Nvidia has delayed the release of its planned 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. After first announcing the 12GB RTX 4080 alongside a far more powerful 16GB variant last month, Nvidia now concedes that the nomenclature was incorrect. “The RTX 4080 12GB is a terrific graphics card, but it’s not labeled correctly,” Nvidia writes on its blog. “It’s perplexing to have two GPUs with the 4080 names.”
Nvidia has paused the introduction of the 12GB RTX 4080 variant but will still release the 16GB model on November 16th.
Nvidia’s choice to identify the 12GB model as an RTX 4080 sparked outrage, especially given how different the 16GB model was. The RTX 4080 12GB was intended to start at $899 and have 7,680 CUDA Cores, a base frequency of 2.31GHz that can be increased to 2.61GHz, 639 Tensor-TFLOPs, 92 RT-TFLOPs, and 40 Shader-TFLOPs. The 16GB RTX 4080 has 9,728 CUDA Cores, a base rate of 2.21GHz that can be increased to 2.51GHz, 780 Tensor-TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader-TFLOPs of power.
It now means that anybody looking for a more affordable RTX 40-series card would have to wait a little longer. The RTX 4080 16GB variant will be available next month for $1,199, and Nvidia has not said when the 12GB RTX 4080 will be relaunched under a new moniker.
