The first review of a Chinese-exclusive "RTX 4090D" GPU model hit the internet last week—Expreview received a sample GALAX RTX 4090 D Metal Master model not long ago, and their testing team proceeded to find out whether the nerfed version of NVIDIA's flagship gaming GPU was truly compromised in terms of performance. Effective October 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission placed restrictions on Team Green—thus blocking trade of units based on the "Ada Lovelace" AD102-300 GPU in China. In turn, a variant—AD102-250-A1—was prepared in order to confirm to new policies.

NVIDIA's China-specific GeForce RTX 4090D launched officially right at the end of 2023. Board partner GALAX seems to be leading the pack, with customized versions being sent out for evaluation. The GeForce RTX 4090D GPU arrives with a lesser configuration: 14,592 CUDA, 456 Tensor, and 114 RT cores—but the first review indicates that this only trails behind its uncompromised sibling by roughly 5 to 6% across sixteen games. It lags behind in Stable Diffusion benchmarks—an AI workload at 512x512 resolution shows a 10% difference, although the gaps narrows at 768x768 and 1024x1024.Expreview managed to overclock the GALAX RTX 4090 D Metal Master sample by 200 MHz, but software restrictions prevented any further progress.VideoCardz believes that the GeForce RTX 4090 D GPU's "official" maximum TGP (425 W) barrier can be exceeded—with modification of software—the upper limit could be 480 W.

The general consensus seems to be:

• RTX 4090D vs. RTX 4090 in Rasterized Gaming: -5.5%
• RTX 4090D vs. RTX 4090 in Ray-Traced Gaming: -5.8%
• RTX 4090D vs. RTX 4090 in Frame-Generated Gaming: -5.0%
• RTX 4090D vs. RTX 4090 in Productivity (AI, Content, etc.): -6.0-%

Gamers in the region will be shelling out for standard RTX 4090 pricing—12,999 RMB ($1599 USD)—with a relatively minor reduction in overall performance.