It's being reported that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 might come with a China-exclusive variant called the RTX 5090D, and that it will be arriving in January 2025. If true, this rumor not only suggests that Nvidia is working on a follow-up to the China-exclusive RTX 4090D, but that it will be out in 2025 rather than 2024.
The RTX 5090 is expected to be the flagship graphics card in the upcoming Nvidia Blackwell range of gaming GPUs. It seems a nailed-on certainty to be the best graphics card you can buy when it arrives, but there's still a lot we don't yet know about the new card.
The new RTX 5090D rumor comes from regular X (formerly Twitter) tech leaker, @hongxing2020. Having previously leaked a Black Myth Wukong RTX 4080 (not that the official existence of this card has yet been confirmed), their latest social media musing simply states "Next gen 90D ready. 2025.1."
While that seems fairly cryptic, the leaker's history of association with Nvidia GPU leaks makes the implications quite clear. The suggestion is that there's an RTX 5000 series (next-gen) card with a 90D product name variant. Given that Nvidia only has one previous product with that style of name - the RTX 4090D - it's a fair assumption we're looking at an RTX 5090D.
The RTX 4090D was a response by Nvidia to restrictions that the US government placed on the company in regards to exporting the very fastest chips available to China, primarily in an effort to forestall China's growing supremacy in AI and other emerging tech markets. The RTX 4090D had 11% fewer CUDA cores than the standard RTX 4090 and its TDP was dropped by 50W, although some overclocked variants soon got around the latter restriction.
This rather light approach to limiting the RTX 4090 was possibly a result of Nvidia having a limited time window to engineer a new version of its flagship card that could circumvent the export restrictions. As such, it's possible that the RTX 5090D will be even more restricted, with Nvidia having had a much longer period to think about how to limit these China-bound GPUs.
As for the "2025.1" line, this clearly refers to the card being expected to launch in the first month of 2025. While that may seem a long way off, it could be the case that Nvidia is holding back the launch of this restricted variant in order to make the biggest splash possible with its main RTX 5090 launch. However, it is also possible that the RTX 5090 release date could be pushed back to early next year, even if most rumors so far suggest it will arrive at some point in 2024.
For more details of what to expect from Nvidia's upcoming flagship GPU, check out these stories on the expected RTX 5090 clock speed, the rumored RTX 5090 power limit, and our overall RTX 5090 guide for a summation of everything we know so far.
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