Overpowered GeForce RTX 5090D takes huge lead over RTX 4090 in benchmark chart and doubles DirectX 12 test result

Team Green has faced a lot of flak lately for a variety of reasons, but a single sample of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090D (marketed as the “5090 D”) has come up with an amazing result on PassMark that should at least put a wry grin on Jensen Huang’s face. The China-only graphics card produced an average result of 45,948 and churned out 304 FPS in the site’s DirectX 12 test. To put those results into perspective, the next two highest performers, the RTX 5090 and RTX 4090, put together 39,209/212 FPS and 38,430/150 FPS, respectively.

The GeForce RTX 5090D is Nvidia’s version of the regular RTX 5090 that has been slightly altered so that it can be sold in China without incurring US wrath. The main specifications, such as CUDA core amount and memory configuration are identical, but the RTX 5090D has to make do with a shackled AI performance: 2,375 AI TOPS compared to 3,352 AI TOPS for the international variant (TOPS = trillions of operations per second). So, the RTX 5090D might not be as “smart” as the RTX 5090 but that hasn’t stopped it tearing up the G3D Mark benchmark.

In addition, it has been recently highlighted that PassMark has accidentally nerfed the performance of Blackwell cards due to a software layer compatibility problem (Nvidia’s removal of 32-bit framework support). While the site creates a patch to solve that issue, it could be expected that RTX 50-series cards would continue to struggle. But not only has the regular RTX 5090 finally leapfrogged the RTX 4090 in the chart, the RTX 5090D has also gone way beyond expectations. The Blackwell card produced a +19.6% improvement over the RTX 4090 in the overall benchmark result, while it attained an astonishing +102.7% gain over the Ada Lovelace card in the DirectX 12 test.

The comparison with the RTX 4090, and not the RTX 4090D, has been deliberate here. Only nine samples of the China-only Ada Lovelace card have been tested on the site, compared to over 14,500 of the regular RTX 4090, and it produced much weaker results: Overall - 28,686, DirectX 12 - 128 FPS. The GeForce RTX 5090D sample is likely to have been overclocked, as there is a precedent for this thanks to a video shared by Tony Yu of Asus, which showed a modified RTX 5090D card scoring 43,372 points in 3DMark Port Royal. In our review of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 FE, the 3DMark Port Royal score was 37,335 points, so this gives the overclocked RTX 5090D a +16.2% gain.