DF Direct Weekly takes on Nvidia’s RTX 4080 12GB ‘unlaunching’ u-turn

I’ve been covering PC graphics hardware in earnest for around eight years now and I’m not sure I’ve seen a u-turn quite as profound as the RTX 4080 12GB ‘unlaunching’ situation. Logistically, the implications are profound: those cards have been manufactured, the packaging is likely waiting. The GPUs themselves may even have RTX 4080 branding that’ll need to be addressed. Ultimately though, it was the right decision to make – as we discuss in this week’s DF Direct.

The RTX 4080 12GB’s pricing only really makes sense if you can ignore the existence of the RTX 3080 and the wealth of availability for the Ampere line-up both in terms of brand-new stock and second-hand bargains. Launching at $699 in 2020, it was based on the same GA102 processor as the much more expensive RTX 3090 – which was only about 15 percent faster. At the most extreme end, a $2000 RTX 3090 Ti arrived much later – and yet it’s still only about 25 percent faster than the standard 3080. An $899 4080 12GB makes some kind of sense compared to those much more expensive GA102 offerings, but the $699 RTX 3080 follows it like a mocking shadow.

Not helping matters are Nvidia’s latest round of benchmarks. Three titles are chosen: Flight Simulator, A Plague Tale: Requiem and F1 22. Each game offers up varying performance differentials but the bottom line is that a notional 29 percent increase in cost against the RTX 3080 delivered a minimum 11 percent of extra performance at native 4K resolution (A Plague Tale: Requiem) and a maximum 24 percent in F1 22. DLSS 3 is used to beef up the numbers in favour of the new Ada Lovelace card – but while we’re excited by the technology, it’s not the finished article and its use in benchmarks isn’t a great move, not least because only a few DLSS 3 titles are available. Whichever way you look at the RTX 3080 12GB, the spectre of the RTX 3080 looms too large.

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