Nvidia has paused the release of the upcoming 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. Having originally revealed the 12GB RTX 4080 last month along with a much more powerful 16GB model, Nvidia now admits it got it wrong. “The 12GB RTX 4080 is a great graphics card, but it’s not properly named,” Nvidia says in a blog post. “Having two GPUs set to 4080 is confusing.”
Nvidia has now paused the release of the 12GB RTX 4080 model, but will continue to release the 16GB version on November 16.
Criticism was growing over Nvidia’s decision to call the 12GB model an RTX 4080, particularly when the 16GB model was a completely different one. The RTX 4080 12GB was supposed to start at $899 and include 7,680 CUDA Cores, a 2.31GHz base clock that boosts up to 2.61GHz, 639 Tensor-TFLOPs, 92 RT-TFLOPs, and 40 Shader-TFLOPs. The 16GB RTX 4080 is much more powerful, with 9,728 CUDA Cores, a 2.21GHz base clock that boosts up to 2.51GHz, 780 Tensor-TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader-TFLOPs of power.
This now means that anyone hoping to get their hands on an affordable RTX 40 series card will now have to wait even longer. The RTX 4080 16GB model will debut next month, with a starting price of $1,199, and Nvidia hasn’t revealed when it will re-launch the 12GB RTX 4080 under a different name.
“Freelance web ninja. Wannabe communicator. Amateur tv aficionado. Twitter practitioner. Extreme music evangelist. Internet fanatic.”