Nvidia has scrapped a plan to launch a less powerful 12GB version of its RTX 4080 graphics card.
Agreeing with what tech reviewers and critics have been saying in the past three weeks since the card’s announcement, the company acknowledged that having two GPUs with the same 4080 designations was “confusing”.
“The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. So, we’re pressing the ‘unlaunch’ button on the 4080 12GB,” Nvidia said.
The release of the higher-end 16GB variant will go ahead on 16 November 2022.
Although the company has previously released GPUs carrying the same main model name with different amounts of video memory, they still shared much of the same specifications in other areas.
Aside from the 4GB VRAM difference, the RTX 4080 12GB and 16GB models have different Cuda core counts, clock speeds, memory interface widths, and TDPs, as shown in the table below.
These differences raised red flags among critics, who accused Nvidia of branding the card as an RTX 4080 when it should have been the RTX 4070.
Using this approach, the company would be able to charge more for the card.
That is despite Nvidia’s own benchmarks of the cards showing the 16GB model was around 20-30% faster than the 12GB variant.
In addition, the RTX 4080 12GB was slower than the RTX 3090 Ti in games without DLSS enabled.
The chart below compares the performance of the RTX 40 series cards with the RTX 30 series in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Source: My Broadband
