Nvidia has unveiled a new version of its popular graphics card, the RTX 4090D, after the original model was banned from being sold to China due to U.S. sanctions. Many had concerns that the 4090D would suffer significant reductions in power, cores, and frequency, but recent tests by Expreview reveal that the performance difference is only minimal, with the 4090D being just 5% slower on average.
While the 4090D utilizes a different chip, the AD102-250 die instead of the AD103-300 chip found in the 4090, it retains the same boost clock speed of 2,520MHz and even has a slightly higher base frequency at 2,280MHz compared to 2,235MHz. The memory speed, capacity, and VRAM bus width remain unchanged as well.
In gaming benchmarks, the 4090D shows only a 5.5% average performance difference compared to the 4090 when ray tracing is disabled. Even in games with ray tracing, the gap narrows slightly to 5.8%. The largest performance gap observed was 7.6%, which is hardly noticeable during gameplay.
Considering the concerns over China accessing advanced AI hardware, it was expected that the 4090D would suffer more in AI workloads. While it does lag behind by approximately 10% in Stable Diffusion at 512×512 resolution, the performance gap diminishes at higher resolutions. However, performance in AI applications such as D5 Render and Blender saw a significant drop of over 10%.
Contrary to early rumors, the 4090D does offer some overclocking capabilities. Although its TDP is capped at 425 watts, it is still possible to achieve a 200MHz overclock. Should the TDP cap be unlocked in the future, the 4090D could potentially achieve performance levels on par with the original 4090.
Ultimately, the impact of the U.S. sanctions on the RTX 4090 seems modest. While the 4090D is marginally slower, the difference is unlikely to be noticeable in practical usage. The U.S. government, recognizing this, has begun to ease its strict GPU export regulations, suggesting a shift in perspective regarding the potential risks associated with such technology.
The source of the article is from the blog zaman.co.at