In surprising news, Nvidia has announced that the company is “unlaunching” the 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. The company posted a blog post saying, “the RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing.”
The 12GB version of RTX 4080 not only had less memory, but it also had a slower graphics processor, fewer CUDA cores, and a narrower data path. The 16 GB model has 9,728 CUDA cores while the 12 GB model has 7,680 cores. So, there was a performance gap between the 12GB and 16GB models even if both GPUs are called RTX 4080.
The company has not confirmed anything about the future of the 12 GB RTX 4080. The company has not yet started the production of the card but we are not sure what exactly “unlaunching” mean.
The company will launch 16GB RTX 4080 at $1,199 and it will be the only RTX 4080 model launching on November 16.
The RTX 40-series is built on a new Ada Lovelace architecture and uses TSMC’s 4nm N4 technology. Nvidia also recently launched its flagship GPU RTX 4090, for $1,599.
