The GeForce RTX 4090 ban came into effect in China the week before. Stocks of the Ada flagship have mostly dried up, leaving room for scalpers and malfeasants alike. This has caused a surge in the popularity of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards. Rumors of a potential ban on these cards across the country circulated the web earlier this week. However, regional sources report that board partners have received no such notification.
On the contrary, the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX have been selling like hotcakes in China. The ban on the GeForce RTX 4090 makes the 7900 XTX the fastest GPU for rasterization, ahead of the RTX 4080. Consequently, the stocks of these top-end RDNA 3 graphics cards have dwindled, putting pressure on the GPU supply chain.
AMD’s previously planned production of these RX 7900 series GPUs is expected to fall short of the renewed demand, leaving the market vulnerable to price fluctuations, scalping, and hardware shortages. The stocks of these Radeon cards are expected to remain lean for the rest of 2023, possibly extending into the initial months of 2024.
Luckily (and unluckily) for AMD, NVIDIA is said to be working on a GeForce RTX 4090 “D” graphics card for the Chinese market. It will likely offer performance similar to the stock RTX 4090, with nominal cuts to the SM count and possibly memory.
Source: Expreview.
