Are You Going To Buy An RTX 4080, Or Just Settle For An RTX 4080?

NVIDIA Apparently Doesn’t Remember The Last Memory Debacle

One would assume that after the 3.5 GB memory controversy NVIDIA would be careful about ensuring the amount of VRAM on their GPUs was absolutely clear which goes to show why you should never assume anything.  The new RTX 4080 revealed at GTC comes in two flavours and it seems it may not be completely evident to the average public which one you will get.  There are both an RTX 4080 16GB card an an RTX 4080 12GB card, both of which share the same name.

It’s not just the memory which is different, the RTX 4080 has 9728 CUDA cores, a 2.51GHz Boost clock, and a 256-bit memory interface.  The RTX 4080, on the other hand, has 7680 CUDA cores, a slightly higher 2.61GHz Boost and a 192-bit memory bandwidth.  The power consumption is also a bit different, the RTX 4080 chews up 320W with a total system power of 750W while the RTX 4080 only uses 285W and wants a total system power of 700W.

This is certain not to cause any problems.

The good news is there is only one version of the RTX 4090, though it will cost you $1600 to be sure of which card you end up with; meanwhile the RTX 4080’s will cost “$899 and up“.  The cards come with new features in addition to increased performance, for instance some old games can benefit from RTX Remix which enables NVIDIA cards to do some very interesting things with the lighting and textures of old games like Morrowind.  It seems likely you will need to download a package from NVIDIA for each game, which should be available about the same time the cards go on sale.

Jensen Huang also introduced DLSS 3, demonstrating Microsoft Flight Sim at both a ridiculous resolution and frame rate, 4K at over 100fps is certainly impressive!  As with RTX Remix, this won’t work on all games but you can expect newer titles will be looking to make use of it in the future.

If you are looking for some specific cards, PNY have already reached out to let us know that they will be releasing a VERTO GeForce RTX 4090, an RTX 4080 and an RTX 4080 in the first half of October.  All cards will be PCI Express 4.0, have a triple fan cooler and offer DisplayPort 1.4a and HDMI 2.1 out.  The boxes will contain more than just the GPU, inside you should find a VGA support kits, PCIe-5 12VHPWR adapter and software to run their EPIC-X RGB lighting.