It was just last month that we saw NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang launch their latest generation of graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 40 series. Confusingly though, while the headline GPU was the RTX 4090, sitting below it in the product stack was not one, but two GeForce RTX 4080s. These two weren’t even that close in performance either as the one with 16GB of VRAM was far more capable than the one with 12GB of VRAM.
Following a lot of criticism that their naming scheme was bound to lead to confusion among gamers and PC users, NVIDIA has now announced that they’re ‘unlaunching’ the RTX 4080 12GB. According to NVIDIA, the RTX 4080 12GB is a capable GPU that isn’t named right. This means that it won’t be available for purchase in November as previously planned. This doesn’t affect the RTX 4080 16GB though, which will be available worldwide on the 16th of November.
“The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing. So, we’re pressing the “unlaunch” button on the 4080 12GB.
The RTX 4080 16GB is amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere on November 16th,” – NVIDIA statement
As we mentioned earlier, the two GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards seemed to have wildly different capabilities. The 16GB version not only has more GDDR6X VRAM, but also a bigger memory interface width at 256-bit compared to the 12GB version’s 192-bit, as well as significantly more CUDA cores at 9,728 to 7,680 on the 12GB card. The now only available version of the RTX 4080 also packs 780 Tensor-TFLOPs of performance, compared to 639 Tensor-TFLOPs on the graphics card formerly known as the RTX 4080 12GB.
There’s no word from NVIDIA just yet on what they plan to do with the 12GB card, but it’s likely to be relaunched later as the GeForce RTX 4070—perhaps what it should’ve been called in the first place too. Nevertheless, at the moment the RTX 4080 16GB will still be launching as planned on 16 November, with local recommended retail pricing for it starting at RM6,300.
