---
title: 'Blackwell: Datacenter vs GeForce GPUs'
date: '2026-02-27'
description: 'Jensen scammed me.'
tags: ['Nvidia', 'GPU', 'GPU Kernel']
---


I'm a proud owner for an RTX 5090 FE. I occasionally play games on it, but it's mostly used for ML workloads.
I jumped on the 50-series especially for the fp4 support on their 5th generation blackwell tensor cores, cause I'm actively working on some pretty exciting low precision computing.
Imagine my surprise when I was perusing the GPU mode discord and find people calling the GeForce blackwell cards "Fake blackwell"?!!
Looking online, I found next to no resources on the difference. I foolishly assumed that my GeForce card (arch=sm_120) would contain all the features from the datacenter cards (arch=sm_100), as
it seemed to be a later arch. No, Nvidia just made it more confusing, and obscured the technical details extremely well. Going through the [cuda documentation](https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/),
you'll see that the new tensor core gen 5 instructions are only compatible with `sm_100[a-f]` (Datacenter Blackwell) and `sm_101` (Jetson Thor). What does this mean? That involved a lot more digging.