Nvidia’s upcoming flagship in the RTX 50 series caters to enthusiasts and professionals, offering 32GB VRAM for applications like generative AI, rendering, and video editing. For those eyeing up the RTX 5090, benchmarks for both the global GeForce RTX 5090 and the China-only RTX 5090D have appeared on the Blender open benchmarking database, shedding light on their performance capabilities. There’s a noticeable performance gap between the two versions, as well as a difference compared to the previous flagship.

This isn't the first time Nvidia has released two variants of the same card, with the RTX 4090D previously featuring fewer CUDA cores than its global counterpart. In compliance with US export controls, the RTX 5090D will once again be slightly slower than the global RTX 5090, according to the Blender benchmarks.

RTX 5090 will be the fastest graphics card on the market

The Blender results come from two unnamed reviewers using the built-in benchmarking tool, reportedly unintentionally – the 5090D entry has since been removed. According to these benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 5090 is 36% faster than last year’s flagship, the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5090D is 27.6% faster. This indicates that the RTX 5090 will be notably better than the RTX 5090D (it is 21% faster according to these results).

However, it's important to note that these results come from different versions of Blender's benchmark.

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The slower performance of the RTX 5090D is likely due to AI chip export restrictions, as Nvidia cannot release the global RTX 5090 GPU in China or other restricted markets. To circumvent these limitations, the ‘D’ variant is limited in its use in AI and similar workflows. While this shouldn’t impact gaming or general productivity performance too much, there is a noticeable gap between the two variants.

That said, reviews for the RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D reportedly drop on January 23rd, just a week before the RTX 5080 launch. This is when we might get to learn more about the exact differences between these two variants.

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.