With the original RTX 4090 falling foul of U.S. sanctions, a replacement card was needed. This replacement comes in the form of the RTX 4090 D, which was launched at the end of 2023. ExpReview, which received a test copy from Galax, gives us its conclusions on the latter!
RTX 4090 D: very little difference in performance with the Western version!
As a reminder, this “D” version of the card features a neutered GPU compared to the original model. As we said, this version still benefits from an AD102 GPU, but with 14 SM less than our version. This translates into 14,592 cuda cores compared with 16,384. Similarly, the number of RT cores and Tensor cores has been reduced: 456 and 144 compared with 512 and 128.
In practice, this translates into very little difference in performance between the two cards. Expect to pay around 5 to 6% less for the limited version, which isn’t really that limited after all. Yes, the memory part has not evolved at all, while the boost frequencies are identical to the Western version.
In the end, on a panel of 16 games, our colleagues found that the two cards were very close in terms of performance. Clearly, the 4090 is still in the lead, as is the synthetic benchmark. In the end, the biggest difference is measured on productivity tasks, notably AI and content creation, where the Chinese version lags behind by 6% overall.
For the rest, this model retails for the same price as the original: 12,999 yuan.
