Let's take a moment this Thanksgiving season to express our gratitude over the fact that Nvidia caved into pressure from the PC enthusiast community and canceled the RTX 4080 12GB, which means the RTX 4080 16GB is now the only RTX 4080-class GPU coming down the pipeline — we'll add it to our list of GPU benchmarks and the best graphics cards as soon as it's available.
There will of course be future RTX 4080 Ti / Super / Whatever cards at some point — probably next year — but those will presumably be clearly labeled as such. Really, it's a case of people being pissed about Nvidia trying to charge $899 for a card with only 12GB VRAM on a 192-bit memory interface.
While the RTX 4080 takes the reigns from the previous generation RTX 3080, it's also worth pointing out that it's inheriting the pricing of the RTX 3080 Ti rather than the far more attractively priced RTX 3080 (10GB). The RTX 4080 (formerly 16GB) meanwhile still has the following specs.
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | AD103 |
| Process Technology | TSMC 4N |
| Transistors (Billion) | 45.9 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 378.6 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 76 |
| GPU Cores (Shaders) | 9728 |
| Tensor Cores | 304 |
| RT Cores | 76 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 2505 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 22.4 |
| VRAM (GB) | 16 |
| VRAM Bus Width | 256 |
| L2 Cache | 64 |
| Render Outputs | 112 |
| Texture Mapping Units | 304 |
| FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision) | 48.7 |
| FP16 TFLOPS with Sparsity (FP8) | 390 (780) |
| Bandwidth (GB/s) | 717 |
| Total Board Power (Watts) | 320 |
| Launch Date | November 16, 2022? |
| Launch Price | $1,199 |
As far as we know, the RTX 4080 has the same specification as the formerly announced 16GB card. Nvidia hasn't updated the product page to say otherwise, so unless that happens the RTX 4080 will be as above. Unlike on most previous architectures, the top card at launch and the penultimate card from Nvidia are using two different GPU dies, AD102 for the RTX 4090 and AD103 for the RTX 4080. Neither GPU is fully enabled, though the RTX 4080 comes pretty close.
With RTX 4080, you get 76 SMs out of a potential 80 SMs for the full AD103. We could see a fully enabled GPU in the future, but more likely is that it will not be a desktop GeForce card — it could be a mobile chip, or for the professional Nvidia GPU offerings (probably upgraded to 32GB of memory). That means 9,728 CUDA cores and 304 Tensor cores, alongside 76 RT cores.
Theoretical performance tips the scales at 48.7 teraflops FP32, 390 teraflops of FP16, and 780 teraflops of FP8 for AI workloads (with sparsity enabled). That's about 20% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, though you're getting less memory and memory bandwidth. The 64MB of L2 cache should make up for the drop in memory bandwidth in most workloads, particularly gaming.
Speaking of which, this will be the first and so far only graphics card to officially use GDDR6X memory clocked higher than 21 Gbps. Micron also makes a 24 Gbps chip, but Nvidia apparently decided to step back to 22.4 Gbps for the RTX 4080. There are already RTX 4090 cards that apparently have 24 Gbps chips (marked as 21 Gbps, but overclocking proves they're not), and based on how those cards perform, the 24 Gbps chips run cooler and use less power, which is how Nvidia manages to keep the power down to a relatively tame 320W.
The launch date is rumored to be November 16, just a few weeks away and about a month after the RTX 4090 launch. Nvidia likely hopes to beat AMD's RDNA 3 to market, though we'll know more about the AMD offerings shortly (on November 3).
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