Nvidia says it’s ‘unlaunching’ the 12GB RTX 4080 after backlash

Nvidia is pausing 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 with the naming. “The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right,” says Nvidia 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 still go ahead and launch the 16GB version on November 16th.

Criticism had been building over Nvidia’s decision to label the 12GB model as an RTX 4080, particularly when the 16GB model was so different. The RTX 4080 12GB Ti was supposed to start at $899 and include 7,680 CUDA Cores, a 2.31GHz base clock that boosts 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 that boosts 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 is now going to have to wait longer. The RTX 4080 16GB model will debut next month, priced from $1,199, and Nvidia hasn’t revealed when it plans to relaunch the 12GB RTX 4080 under a different name.