Nvidia caught with its pants down, will ‘unlaunch’ the 12GB RTX 4080
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There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the recently unveiled Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 12GB version, and it looks like the company has finally given in to the proverbial pressure and made an unexpected decision.
Nvidia (opens in new tab) announced it would ‘unlaunch’ the 12GB RTX 4080. According to the official report, the reason for the unlaunching is that “the RTX 4080 12GB is a great graphics card, but it doesn’t have the right name. It’s confusing to have two GPUs with the 4080 designation.”
However, the 16GB version of the graphics card is still gearing up for a November 16 release, announcing that it’s “amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere.”
What happened to the RTX 4080 12GB?
There was much controversy around the 12GB RTX 4080 and its specs, especially considering its hefty $899 starting price tag. In fact, compared to the 16GB version, we found that the graphics cards used two different chips: the 16GB has the AD103 GPU chip while the 12GB has the AD104 chip used.
Not only that, but the 4080 has 2,048 fewer CUDA cores, less cache, and a smaller bus width. While we don’t have the card to test at the moment, this would most likely result in a 20-25% performance difference between the 12GB and 16GB versions. That’s a huge difference for models with the same 4080 branding. And benchmarks have also been leaked from Overclock3D that support that proposed performance difference.
This led many to believe that the 12GB 4080 was a 4070 in disguise, overpriced. Judging by both the lackluster performance and the fact that Nvidia delayed the launch with a rebrand on the horizon, there’s a lot of praise for that theory. Hopefully an error of this magnitude will not happen again.