Nvidia “Unlaunches” RTX 4080 12GB

Nvidia has announced that it is “unlaunching” its recently-announced GeForce RTX 4080 12GB. The RTX 4080 16GB is still set for launch on November 16, but the company will be holding back the RTX 4080 12GB because, according to Nvidia, having two GPUs with the same name will be confusing for customers.

“So, we’re pressing the ‘unlaunch’ button on the 4080 12GB,” said the company in a statement announcing the unlaunch. “The RTX 4080 16GB is amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere on November 16th.”

While the company hasn’t elaborated any further, it is quite likely that we’ll see the RTX 4080 12GB rebranded as the RTX 4070 and launched at a later date with a different price tag.

The RTX 4080 12GB was announced alongside the RTX 4080 16GB, and the flagship RTX 4090. Part of Nvidia’s new RTX 40-series lineup, the graphics cards make use of the new Ada Lovelace architecture, which is set to be twice as fast in rasterisation and four times faster in ray tracing than the previous generation’s Ampere architecture.

While the RTX 4080 12GB and RTX 4080 16GB bear the same name indicating that the only real difference would be the amount of VRAM the two GPUs would have, the reality is that both GPUs feature different clock speeds, different boost clocks, and different numbers of CUDA cores.

For more details, here’s everything you need to know about Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs.