NVIDIA Launches Second-Cut Graphics Cards in China

Recently, NVIDIA has officially launched the new GeForce RTX 5090D v2 for the Chinese mainland market to replace the banned RTX 5090 D. The overall video memory and bandwidth have been reduced by approximately 25% to meet the U.S. government's export control requirements, but the pricing of 5090D remains the same at RMB 16,499 (approximately USD 2,298).

Observing that the website found on e-commerce platforms, currently, manufacturers such as ASUS, Colorful, and GIGABYTE have fully listed the 5090D V2, with a starting price of 16,499 yuan, but some flagship and sub-flagship models have further increased in price to 17,499 yuan or even close to 19,000 yuan. In addition, the newly released 5090 and 5090D that have been banned are now "hard to find," and there is also a certain degree of premium in the second-hand market.

According to the latest specifications of the RTX 5090D v2 published on the official NVIDIA website, it retains the same GB202-240 GPU chip as the RTX 5090D, with a base clock of 2.01 GHz and a boost clock of 2.41 GHz. However, the video memory has been reduced from 512-bit 32GB GDDR7 to 384-bit 24GB GDDR7, resulting in a decrease in memory bandwidth from 1792 GB/s to 1344 GB/s, which complies with the U.S. export control regulations prohibiting memory bandwidth exceeding 1.4 GB/s.

Although the number of CUDA cores, an important parameter, remains unchanged and supports all the latest technologies such as RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D, the RTX 5090D v2 has further reduced the video memory capacity and bandwidth by 25% on top of the "downgraded" performance of the 5090D.

According to the specifications previously announced by NVIDIA, the RTX 5090D significantly reduced AI computing power while keeping the core configuration basically unchanged, decreasing from 3352TOPS to 2375TOPS, a reduction of about 29.15% (RTX 5090 AI computing power is 3352TOPS).

Analysts point out that even though the difference in gaming performance is not significant, the 5090D V2 is obviously behind the 5090D in terms of productivity and AI, let alone the 5090. Preliminary data shows that compared to the 5090D, the latest released 5090D V2 has a gaming performance reduction of about 1-2%, but AI and productivity performance has further declined by 10-25%.

In January this year, when NVIDIA released the RTX 50 series graphics cards, it also launched the China-specific flagship graphics card RTX 5090D that meets the U.S. export control rules. At a price of 16,499 yuan, it was higher than the 1999 dollars of the RTX 5090, despite the computing power being cut over 29%. However, in April this year, the Trump administration upgraded the export control on NVIDIA's AI chips, making the original NVIDIA H20 chips and the RTX 5090D exports to China restricted.

Original text: www.toutiao.com/article/1840506101682248/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author.