Despite its tendency to burn out, the RTX 4090 is nonetheless a powerful graphics card, and a popular one at that. In China, it’s a model that finds its audience, despite its high price in absolute terms. However, its price is not about to come down, since, as we saw yesterday, this card is banned from export to China, but not only there. As a result, its price is skyrocketing, simply because stocks will not be replenished!
RTX 4090: end of stock in China, prices double!
For the record, the RTX 4090 was initially launched in China at 12,999 yuan, or around €1,680 at current prices. Following the U.S. decision to ban the export of anything even slightly high-performance to China, prices are skyrocketing in the few stores that still have some stock. It’s not uncommon to see a card costing over 26,000 yuan (€3,356), with some models going for 40,000 yuan (€5,165).
Once again, the reason is quite simple: stocks of this card will simply not be renewed, despite demand for it.
This situation is likely to affect more than just China, since the ban applies to no fewer than 47 countries. Admittedly, they don’t represent a market as juicy as China’s, but all the same. These include countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Cyprus (?), Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others. In short, more or less all Middle Eastern destinations and non-Western countries, to put it simply.
Furthermore, as VideoCardz points out, it would not be surprising to see NVIDIA readapt its map to comply with American requirements. After all, if Zimbabwe doesn’t represent a major market for the greens, China does. To be able to export its hardware, NVIDIA will have to offer a card with a memory bandwidth of no more than 600 GB/s, combined with a GPU whose performance does not exceed 4800 TOPS.
However, we can also wonder what will happen in these countries in the future. Mechanically, card performance increases from generation to generation. Will China have to make do with GPUs with less performance than an RTX 4090 from now on?
