Following the U.S. export ban of the RTX 4090 and other Nvidia GPUs to China, Chinese consumers are looking for alternatives. Existing high-end RTX cards are being stripped down and repurposed into AI accelerators, and even AMD GPUs from suppliers like Dell are being restricted from sale to China, though that's a Dell decision rather than a government requirement.
Chinese site Expreview reports that AMD's RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT cards are experiencing a significant surge in sales thanks to the RTX 4090 restrictions. AMD's GPUs aren't banned, as they fail to reach the performance levels defined by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The RX 7900 XT has a TPP rating of 1,955 — well short of the 4,800 level that falls under the restrictions. The RX 7900 XT is even lower, with a TPP of just 1,652.
AMD has indicated that the heightened demand for the RX 7900 GPUs from their Chinese AIBs is too high for them to meet, which is already resulting in a shortage. This shortage seems limited to Chinese AIBs for now, with U.S. consumer pricing currently unaffected. That may change in the future, however, especially if AMD can't correct the shortage before Q1 2024. That's when the shortage is expected to extend to consumers.
The main point of the export restrictions is to limit China's progress on AI and supercomputers. While the AMD RDNA 3 architecture did add some AI processing cores, they're not nearly as numerous or potent as Nvidia's Tensor cores. As an example, the RTX 4090 has up to 330 TFLOPS of FP16 throughput, while the RX 7900 XTX only offers up to 123 TFLOPS of FP16 compute. It's unlikely for AMD to close the gap any time soon, at least with the consumer parts.
Meanwhile, the RX 7900 cards do become considerably more competitive with Nvidia cards when you evaluate rasterized gaming performance and disregard ray-tracing and DLSS performance. The RTX 4090 retains the top spot across our tested resolutions and settings, but the RX 7900 XTX trades blows with the RTX 4080, and does so at a lower price.
Long-term, it's unlikely any of the export restrictions will stop sufficiently determined Chinese hardware enthusiasts (or others) from getting their hands on an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX. In the short-term, however, Chinese consumers may be willing to give AMD a closer look. The 7900 XTX has the same 24GB of VRAM as the RTX 4090, and it competes well against the RTX 4080.
Still, the Nvidia RTX 4090 isn't going to become more common in China, even if the rumored RTX 4090 D makes an appearance — that will still be a lesser version of the RTX 4090 and AD102, after all. In the near term, perhaps lasting into early 2024, AMD RX 7900 shortages in China seem likely to continue.
