In a surprising move by Nvidia, the company official announcement (opens in new tab) It pulls the RTX 4080 12GB off the launch table and removes the model entirely. This is the result of serious backlash from the community about his Nvidia’s horrible naming scheme for the RTX 4080 12GB, which has significantly fewer core counts and memory specs compared to the 4080 16GB variant.
The company rarely admits to its branding mistakes, and what’s even more unusual is its decision to pull the product off the launch table. and 16GB have vastly different core specs, so that nomenclature was downright deceptive.
The RTX 4080 16GB would have featured 9728 CUDA cores using an AD103 GPU, a 256-bit wide bus, 22.6Gbps of GDDR6X memory and 717 GB/s of bandwidth. The RTX 4080 12GB, on the other hand, used only the AD104 GPU and 7680 CUDA cores, paired with 21Gbps GDDR6X running on a 192-bit wide bus, delivering 504 GB/s of bandwidth.
Nvidia Own According to our tests, this huge difference is a spec that translates to a whopping 30% performance difference between the 4080 12GB and 16GB models, which equates to completely different performance tiers when looking at previous GeForce offerings. Given these performance numbers, it’s certainly nice that Nvidia pulled the plug on the RTX 4080 12GB before release.
The RTX 4080 16GB seems to launch as a plain old RTX 4080 with presumably the same specs and without listing the memory capacity as part of the name. We don’t know if the name change will come with a price cut, but given that the 4090 sold out at launch, we don’t expect much. The 3080 10GB was only $699. If Nvidia keeps the 4080 at its previous $1,199 price point, this would be a big step up in generational pricing.
Nvidia has not announced a successor to the RTX 4080 12GB, just removed it from their product stack. The RTX 4080 12GB partner model is likely already in production, so Nvidia is working on a replacement. If Nvidia decides to go that route, it could end up as the RTX 4070 Ti, though we assume it will inherit the RTX 4070 brand. Yes, $599 for the RTX 4070 seems reasonable to us.
There’s probably more going on behind the scenes than just the hype and press outrage over the naming scheme: The RTX 4090 sold out despite its starting price of $1,599. Perhaps Nvidia is sure they can raise other prices. Indeed, looking at the potential hardware costs behind various GPUs, it’s hard to come up with a scenario where the AD103 and AD104 should sell for $1,200 and $900, respectively, to boost Nvidia’s profits. It Is difficult.
AMD’s looming RDNA 3 launch may also be a factor. We hope to have more details in early November.
