NVIDIA is reportedly rushing to get its current, and what could possibly be its last, batch of GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards shipped out to China. More specifically, it is trying to do so before the onset of a US export restriction that is set to go into effect on 17 November.
The race to get its RTX 4090 to its Chinese customers and suppliers comes in light of a new licensing restrictions that filed into the SEC. Filed on 17 October, the initial filing originally omitted any reference to the card, giving rise to the possibility of the card being excluded from the restriction list but clearly, this has not been the case.
According to reports from Chinese tech sites like MyDrivers and Benchlife, this means that NVIDIA will only be allowed to ship out its RTX 4090 to China and other countries that have been placed under the US ban list for the next two weeks. After which, any and all exports of the card into the blacklisted countries will not be allowed.
The US ruling is reflective of the country’s ongoing economic battle with its Asian powerhouse rival in the field of military and AI advancement. The new ruling aims to restrict China’s access to high-performance GPUs, with a limit set at 4,800 TOPs of compute power per component. To that end and consequently, the RTX 4090 and other AD102-powered cards surpass this limit, hence the ban on its export.
In light of the filing, NVIDIA may be able to circumvent the export restriction either by shipping out a variant of the RTX 4090 with a less powerful Lovelace GPU for the Chinese market or releasing a BIOS update that would reduce the capabilities of the card, both of which seem unlikely. The latter option may not even last, given how resourceful some modders are; during the second cryptomining boom, NVIDIA released RTX 30 series cards with a Lite Hash Rate (LHR) limiter, in hopes that such cards would deter miners from hoarding every available piece of its GPU and give gamers a chance to get the card for the express purpose of gaming. Unfortunately, that limiter was bypassed in less than six months after said cards were launched.
(Source: Videocardz, MyDrivers, Benchlife)
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