Nvidia has officially launched the GeForce RTX 4090D, a new China-exclusive RTX 4090 counterpart that meets the United States’ export regulations. The new GPU comes with 14,592 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit wide memory bus, and a 425W power consumption rating. Pricing is the same as Nvidia’s Best GPU the RTX 4090, at ¥12,999 ($1,828).

Compared to the outgoing RTX 4090, the new RTX 4090D has been neutered on two fronts, CUDA cores and power draw. The RTX 4090D features a 12.8% reduction in CUDA cores going from 16,384 down to 14,592 (128 SMs to 114 SMs), and a minute 5.9% reduction in power draw down to 425W from 450W. All other core specifications remain the same between the two, including the 384-bit wide bus, 24GB of GDDR6X memory, and 2.52 GHz boost clock. The only exception is the base clock, which has been brought up slightly to 2.28 GHz from 2.23 GHz.

The new consumer RTX 40 series GPU was made in response to the United States’ latest export regulations which forced Nvidia to stop selling the standard RTX 4090 and other AI/HPC-focused Nvidia GPUs to the Chinese market due to geopolitics. Under the new rules, chip-makers such as Nvidia can only ship out semiconductor processors that don’t exceed specific performance metrics set by the United States.

The performance metric used is known as Total Processing Power (TPP) which is calculated by the maximum compute for a given bit-length using TFLOPs or TOPS multiplied by the number of bits. The maximum threshold allowed by the U.S. export regulations is 4,800. It just so happened that the RTX 4090’s performance level in this benchmark is 10% higher (5,286) than the regulation limit, which is how the 4090 ended up on the ban list.

Direct performance comparisons between the 4090D and 4090 have not been published by Nvidia or any of its AIB partners, but it goes without saying that this new RTX 4090D features a TPP rating of exactly 4,800 or lower, so it can be sold to China. This new model will be China-exclusive, and won’t be coming to other countries (at least for now). We could see the 4090D make an appearance elsewhere,  in other sanctioned states, but that is the only way it is likely to show up outside of China. The sole purpose of the RTX 4090D is to bypass the U.S. export regulations and give China the fastest consumer GPU that regulations allow, plain and simple.