In a move that has clearly taken the gaming community by surprise, NVIDIA has officially “unlaunched” its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB card. That’s right, the card that was expected to be announced alongside the more powerful 16GB variant, will not be making its debut this November.
To be absolutely clear, the RTX 4080 16GB is still on track for its 16 November launch. However, due to an incessant number of complaints from the gaming community and consumers about NVIDIA’s naming convention and awkward decision to release two versions of the GPU at the same time, the GPU brand has decided to bite the bullet and pull the card off the proverbial shelf, citing that having two GPU with the designation as being “confusing”.
As such, the RTX 4080 12GB is likely to be renamed as something else, possibly as a mid-range RTX 4070, a name that initial rumours leading up to the launch of the RTX 40 Series first hinted at. At an initial starting price of RM4730, the card had 12GB GDDR6X graphics memory, 7630 CUDA Cores, and a base and boost clock of 2.32GHz and 2.61GHz respectively. One constant that remains is that the card, whatever its form in the future, will still be based on NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace architecture, which in turn is based around the 4nm process node, be fitted with 3rd generation Ray-tracing (RT) Cores and 4th generation Tensor Cores, as well as support the latest DLSS 3.0 upscaling technology.
For another matter, NVIDIA simply said that it was taking the RTX 4080 12GB off the list but never actually mentioned when it plans on relaunching the card, or what its new name is going to be. Our guess is that the GPU brand could hold out on doing so until CES 2023 next year, which is usually when most other brands do the same. After all, that is what it did when it announced the RTX 2060 back in 2019.
(Source: NVIDIA)
