When we heard the news that NVIDIA will be halting shipments to Chinese customers for its GeForce RTX 5090D GPU in Q2 , there were some speculations that the company is preparing to make a comeback . Leaving out the Chinese market is a tough decision from a business standpoint, but NVIDIA complies with export regulations imposed by the US administration under Donald Trump. However, the company now plans to keep its presence in China with the release of the export-abiding GeForce "RTX 5090DD" GPU. Carrying a GB202-240 die, it will be a cut-down version with reportedly only 14,080 CUDA cores present, paired with 24 GB of GDDR7 memory. These chip specifications are closely aligned with the pro-viz RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU, which also features a GB202 SKU with 14,080 cores but has 48 GB of GDDR7 memory.

Compared to the previous RTX 5090D, the DD revision will lose about 35% in pure core count and 25% in VRAM capacity. Chinese gamers will notice a significant difference, but so will anyone trying to acquire these GPUs for non-gaming purposes. As the US administration has banned shipments of high-end chips to China to stop them from training military-grade AI, gaming GPUs have been a target of AI firms. Now, a modified GeForce RTX 5090 DD, which not only cuts with raw compute but also firmware, should be sufficient for gaming. Carrying a PG145 SKU 40 board, the new RTX 5090DD GPU will also feature a modified 384-bit bus for its 24 GB of memory, down from the original RTX 5090D's 512-bit bus.