Nvidia is reportedly working on a special variant of the GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card for the Chinese market, in line with US export control policies. Today an image of the GPU's standard box art was shared by renowned leaker MEGAsizeGPU on X. From what we can infer, the RTX 5090D - "D" for Dragon - could hit shelves in parallel with its global counterpart in January.
The RTX 4090D saw the light of day just last December - more than one year after the RTX 4090 was announced. This specific variant was designated for enthusiasts in China - compliant with US trade policy - as Nvidia was effectively barred from exporting the nearly 12% faster RTX 4090. On that note, the RTX 4090D employed a slightly cut-down AD102 chip - which at first wasn't overclockable but certain AIBs had other plans. Recently, we discovered that Chinese cloud providers are using modded RTX 4090D GPUs to offer double the VRAM capacity - at 48GB for AI workloads.
The shared image under the spotlight today depicts the RTX 5090D's logo - the one you'd typically find on the GPU box. The design remains unchanged for the most part - sticking to the "Nvidia Sans Nala" font Team Green introduced with its RTX 40 series. Since the RTX 4090D had no Founders Edition, expect a similar trend to follow with its successor.
We're still in the dark regarding the specifications - leaving room for speculation. The RTX 5090's GB202 die—coming in at 744mm squared—features 170 enabled SMs per leaks. Going by the 10% delta in SMs between last generation's RTX 4090 and 4090D, the RTX 5090D lands in the ballpark of 150-ish SMs or 19,200 CUDA cores. That's still a healthy 78% more than the next-best RTX 5080 - nerfed to just 84 SMs (10,752 CUDA cores). However, we shall have to wait and see what actually transpires.
Jensen Huang is expected to unveil the RTX 50 "Blackwell" lineup of GPUs at CES 2025. Rumors indicate that flagship GPUs - including the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 will arrive first in January - followed by the mid-ranged RTX 5070 offerings. Further down the stack, the RTX 5060 series is slated for a launch in April.
