Nvidia announces that they are "unlaunching" the 12GB version of the RTX 4080 GPU. This comes after most everyone throughout the industry voiced a wealth of criticism over the differences between the 12GB model and the more powerful 16GB model. The latter of which is still planned to launch on November 16.
Nvidia announced this "unlaunch" via a very short blog post earlier in the day. The company says that "the 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it's not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing." They continue on to say that they are "pressing the 'unlaunch' button on the 4080 12GB. The RTX 4080 16GB is amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere on November 16th."
Nvidia had announced three RTX 40-series cards near the end of September. They included the just released RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 16GB model, and the now "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB model. The 16GB model, coming out on November 16 is still slated to be priced at $1,199 (USD). The 12GB model was going to go for $899.
The problem was the fact that right out of the gate, it seemed as though Nvidia simply renamed what was going to be the RTX 4070 as an alternative RTX 4080. Early performance comparisons between the 12GB and 16GB 4080 cards showed that the 12GB model performed way worse than its bigger sibling. The 12GB model performed up to 30% worse than the 16GB model in some cases. Not only was the 12GB model coming up short in VRAM, but it also had fewer Tensor cores, fewer CUDA cores, and fewer RT cores. For having the same name as another card, you would expect most all of the specs to be identical (save for the obvious VRAM difference).
As of today's "unlaunch" it is not clear what Nvidia plans to do with the 12GB RTX 4080. It is believed that Nvidia will simply rebrand the card as the RTX 4070 as it should have been called in the first place.
