Nvidia introduced their latest 40 series GPUs in October this year. Recently, the company announced that it would be “unlaunching” one of its 40 series GPUs following pushback from the gaming community.
Initially, Nvidia planned to release two variants of RTX 4080 GPU. One with 12GB of VRM and the other with 16GB of VRAM. Despite having a similar name, the 12GB variant of RTX 4080 was significantly less powerful than its counterpart.
“The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing,” Nvidia said in a blog post.
“So, we’re pressing the ‘unlaunch’ button on the 4080 12GB,” Nvidia continued. “The RTX 4080 16GB is amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere on November 16th.“
The 12GB variant of RTX 4080 was supposed to retail for $899. Gamers in the PC gaming community found this price to be unreasonable compared to the card’s specifications. The 12GB RTX 4080 was planned to launch with significantly fewer RT, Tensor, and Cuda cores than the 16GB one.
Nvidia did not clarify whether they are canceling the 12GB RTX 4080 altogether. The company might decide to rename the card to RTX 4070 and release it in the market later this year.