With U.S. export restrictions on GPUs hitting a certain performance level for AI, the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 is no longer officially available in China and has been replaced with the GeForce RTX 4090D. For PC gaming, there’s not much separating the two; however, this raises questions about NVIDIA’s plans for the upcoming Blackwell generation.
It’s all but ‘officially confirmed’ that the next-gen GeForce RTX 5090 will be considerably more powerful than the RTX 4090 – with the question now being by how much, 30%, 40%, 80%? According to insider hongxing2020 on X, NVIDIA has its next-gen GeForce RTX 5090D ready and will release the GPU sometime in January 2025.
It’s unclear what the configuration here will be or how it would differ from the baseline GeForce RTX 5090. On that front, NVIDIA could still be working on finalizing the GeForce RTX 50 Series specs. That said, any RTX 5090D would kind of have to be a PC gaming powerhouse – but without the raw AI performance.
How NVIDIA handles this remains to be seen; one possible scenario would be a custom BIOS that doesn’t restrict gaming performance but does limit the GPU’s AI capabilities. PC gaming is not the issue regarding U.S. export restrictions; AI is. Running Star Wars Outlaws or Black Myth Wukong in 4K at 200 FPS is fine, but running powerful AI models and workloads is not.
The January 2025 release window is interesting, too, because current rumors and speculation point to NVIDIA releasing the next-gen GeForce RTX 50 Series with the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 combo at the end of this year or early 2025. We could be looking at a global January 2025 launch. Also, if the GeForce RTX 5080 turns out to be more powerful than the GeForce RTX 4090 – will there be a GeForce RTX 5080D for the region? Time will tell.