NVIDIA ‘s adventure in China is gradually turning sour. The company is drastically losing market share, forcing it to react. What’s more, U.S. sanctions are no stranger to this phenomenon, as the company has had to rethink its RTX 5090D. A new version is in the pipeline, and is rumored to be called RTX 5090 DD. In theory, the recipe would be to offer a completely neutered GPU and memory configuration!
RTX 5090 DD, the new Chinese variant?
With this new version, NVIDIA will be offering a new version of its GPU, to be called GB202-240. As a reminder, the GPU in the RTX 5090D was a GB202-250, while that in the original RTX 5090 is called GB202-300. Incidentally, the initial difference between the RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D is mainly in AI processing capabilities. In-game performance remains identical between the two cards, as does GPU configuration. However, with this DD model, it won’t be the same cup of tea, as the chip will be heavily castrated. Thus, compared with the original 21760 cuda cores, only 14080 would remain, while the memory would lose 25% of its capacity, dropping to 24 GB compared with 32 GB for the other versions. This inevitably has an impact on the memory bus, which is reduced from 512 bits to 384 bits. With this recipe, the Greens seem to be in line with previous rumors of throttling the performance. Of course, if the RTX 5090 D sold at a price close to the 5090 in China, with such a configuration, the Chameleon won’t be able to ask for as much. Initial price estimates point to a bill of $1500. This correlates with expected performance drops of between 20% and 30%, which is far from negligible. This will require price adjustements.
