NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090D for China has restricted AI, crypto-mining performance

NVIDIA's upcoming made-for-China exclusive GeForce RTX 5090D graphics card will have new restrictions in place over the RTX 4090D: stopping AI performance, and gimping cryptomining performance.

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The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090D has been discussed on the Chiphell forums, with a "performance cut-off" in AI and crypto-related applications, where after 3 seconds of sustained workload the GPU will automatically lock its performance (through GPU clock speed reduction or throttling performance through on-board software).

The power limits of the RTX 5090D are most likely going to be restricted, making the RTX 5090D a dud for professional workloads. NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090D will also be blocked from any multi-GPU configurations, meaning adding multiple RTX 5090D cards to a system won't yield any performance benefits, unlike the RTX 4090D which could be stacked.

There will be no AI clusters of RTX 5090D cards running on China -- and that's for Windows -- with Linux also affected, so there's no multi-GPU RTX 5090D setups possible on any operating system.

• Read more: RTX 5090, RTX 5090D rumor: same GPU, same clocks, other parts being tuned
• Read more: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090D special variant for China has been confirmed, coming in 2025

The post on Chiphell explained: "AI is a real man in 3 seconds, and it locks the computing power in 3 seconds for alchemy, and the power consumption is locked, and you are not allowed to pull it online. The default is what it is (not sure if 5090D is like this or 5090 is also like this). Video editing, games, AI repair and the like have no effect".

The post continues, adding: "to put it bluntly, those who buy 4090 as turbo cards will not work on 5090D. NVIDIA has completely blocked this multi-card operation, including the bottom layer of the Linux (operating) system. Good news RTX 5090D is not out of stock after the New Year, bad news RTX 5090 is soaring. Because the main consumer group is not those of us who play games, but those who do AI computing, so in their eyes, 5090D is just a bunch of answers".