NVIDIA on Friday announced that it has decided to “unlaunch” the 12GB RTX 4080.
The news follows after widespread criticism from gamers and PC enthusiasts over the naming and pricing of the graphics card.
“The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing,” NVIDIA said in a press release.
Hence, the company decided to “unlaunch” the 12GB RTX 4080 card.
However, it added that the 16GB version of the RTX 4080 is “amazing” and will be available on time to gamers all over the world on November 16th.
Why NVIDIA Decided To Unlaunch The 12GB RTX 4080?
In September, NVIDIA announced the 12GB RTX 4080 model alongside a more powerful 16GB RTX 4080 model with the only difference between the two being the VRAM (video memory).
Following the launch, the company started garnering criticism for giving both GPUs the same name. Not just this, but what was more surprising was that the two RTX 4080 models were even completely different from each other in terms of specs and benchmarks.
For instance, the RTX 4080 12GB model only has 7680 CUDA cores, paired with 21Gbps GDDR6X operating on a 192-bit memory interface, yielding 504 GB/s of bandwidth.
On the other hand, the RTX 4080 16GB model is reportedly going to feature 9728 CUDA cores, coupled with 22.6Gbps GDDR6X memory running on a 256-bit interface, and yielding 717 GB/s of bandwidth.
Further, the two graphics cards of the same model number even do not use the same graphics processor. While the 12GB variant has to use the AD104 graphics processor, the 16GB variant uses the AD103 GPU.
Moreover, according to Nvidia’s own testing, there is a huge 30% performance difference between the 12GB and 16GB RTX 4080 models, causing many gamers to call out the disparity between these models.
The 16GB model is 27% faster even with DLSS 3.0 enabled, making it significantly better than the 12GB variant.
Although NVIDIA has canceled the launch and deleted mention of the RTX 4080 12GB model from its official website, the company is still on track to launch the 16GB RTX 4080 model on November 16th at a price of $1,199 for NVIDIA’s Founders Edition.
