After criticism over the name and price of its 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card, Nvidia halted its introduction last month. Now, a well-known leaker claims that the “unlaunched” GPU will be reintroduced as the RTX 4070 Ti in January, as Nvidia strives to correct the confusion caused by two RTX 4080 cards with vastly different specifications.
Twitter user kopite7kimi claims that “the original RTX 4080 12GB will become RTX 4070 Ti instead,” and gives a thumbs up when asked about a January 2023 delivery date. Kopite7kimi already forecasted the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 characteristics, as well as the RTX 4090’s power requirement of 450 watts.
The original RTX 4080 12GB will become RTX 4070 Ti instead.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) November 8, 2022
The 12GB RTX 4080, dubbed the RTX 4070 Ti, would make a lot of sense. Nvidia was highly chastised for identifying the 12GB model as an RTX 4080, especially when the 16GB variant was so different. 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.
The focus will now shift to cost, especially because AMD’s next-generation RX 7900 XTX and XT GPUs start at $899 and will be available on December 13th. If AMD’s newest cards outperform the more powerful 16GB RTX 4080 or even come close to Nvidia’s top RTX 4090 cards, it’s difficult to envision Nvidia releasing a $899 RTX 4070 Ti. Nvidia is set to release its RTX 4080 16GB variant next week, with prices starting at $1,199.
