Nvidia produces a mysterious new powerful professional graphics card for the Chinese market only — something tells me there may be more coming
The latest driver list for Nvidia's professional graphics cards included the addition of support for an RTX 5880 Ada Generation unit. The only problem is that this exact item doesn't actually exist yet – meaning it could very well be a product the company created specifically to sell in China.
The model number of the product is incredibly close to the flagship board, designed for professional visualization Tom's hardwareand could be designed to circumvent trade restrictions imposed by the US government in November.
The US prevented Nvidia from selling the latest graphics cards based on the 5nm AD102 GPU, meaning sales of the high-end Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada workstation GPU – an extremely powerful GPU – and the GeForce RTX 4090 were completely banned.
Overcoming GPU Trade Barriers
The company has already laid the groundwork for selling an alternative to the latter – known as the GeForce RTX 4090 D, which is based on the AD102-250 GPU, according to Tweak city. It's also likely that the upcoming RTX 5880 graphics card will be a slightly modified version of the RTX 6000 Ada workstation graphics card.
The AD102 GPU has 18,1876 CUDA cores and 48 GB of GDDR6 RAM in the RTX 6000 cards, while the RTX 5000 cards are powered by an AD102 GPU with 12,800 CUDA cores and 32 GB of GDDR6 RAM.
What may or may not be taken from the sale depends on the total processing power, which is assigned a numerical score. Anything above 4,800 is banned – and this includes the RTX 6000 GPUs, which have a score of 5,828. The RTX 5000 GPUs, on the other hand, have a score of 4,178.
This unlisted RTX 5880 graphics card, about which little else is known, will likely fall below the threshold to be banned for distribution in China. As such, performance won't reach the heights of the RTX 6000 family, but it will certainly be better than the RTX 5000 series GPUs.
Should the launch of the RTX 5880 and GeForce RTX 4090 D graphics cards prove to be a commercial success, it is likely that Nvidia will build on this trial period and attempt to create more alternative, sanction-safe GPUs to sell in the Chinese market.