Nvidia pauses the launch of its upcoming 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. After originally unveiling the 12GB RTX 4080 last month alongside a much more powerful 16GB model, Nvidia now admits it messed up the naming convention. “The RTX 4080 12GB is a great graphics card, but the name is wrong,” Nvidia said in a blog post. “Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing.”
Nvidia is now pausing the launch of the 12GB RTX 4080 model, but will go ahead and launch the 16GB version on November 16.
Nvidia’s decision to label the 12GB model an RTX 4080 was criticized, especially when the 16GB model was so different. The RTX 4080 12GB would start at $899 and would feature 7,680 CUDA cores, a 2.31GHz base clock that ramps 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 base clock of 2.21GHz ramping up to 2.51GHz, 780 Tensor TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader TFLOPs of power.
It now means that anyone hoping for a more reasonably priced RTX 40-series card will now have to wait longer. The RTX 4080 16GB model will debut next month, priced from $1,199, and Nvidia has not revealed when it plans to relaunch the 12GB RTX 4080 under a different name.