Lessons Learned This Time, Perhaps?
It turns out that launching two very different video cards with the same name is as bad an idea as it sounds. Today NVIDIA has pushed the ‘unlauch’ button on the RTX 4080 12GB, which almost makes sense as you can’t buy either RTX 4080 until November 16th. There is of course the small problem that they did announce it and some of us will remember that for far longer than NVIDIA would like.
It is obvious that they will have to rebrand the RTX 4080 12GB card as something else, they can’t be just tossed in the bin but instead will need to be binned differently. This raises an interesting question as NVIDIA must have already started production on RTX 4070’s of various flavours. If the base version, RTX 4070 Ti and perhaps even an RTX 4070 Super have already been taped out then where can they fit a renamed RTX 4080?
You should consider looking at the NVIDIA blog post that officially announced this news, as it doesn’t end the way you might expect an apology might.