Nvidia paused the launch of its 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card last month, after a backlash over the naming and pricing. Now a well-known leaker says the “unlaunched” GPU will return as the RTX 4070 Ti in January, as Nvidia attempts to fix the confusing naming around two RTX 4080 cards that had totally different specs.
Twitter user kopite7kimi says “the original RTX 4080 12GB will become RTX 4070 Ti instead,” and replied to questions on a January 2023 release date with a thumbs up. Kopite7kimi previously correctly predicted the specifications of the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, and that the RTX 4090 would require 450 watts of power.
A return of the 12GB RTX 4080 renamed to the RTX 4070 Ti would make a lot of sense. Nvidia had been criticized heavily for labeling the 12GB model as an RTX 4080, particularly when the 16GB model was so different. The RTX 4080 12GB 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.
Now the attention will turn to pricing, particularly as AMD’s next-gen RX 7900 XTX and XT GPUs start at $899 and will launch on December 13th. It’s hard to imagine Nvidia launching a $899 RTX 4070 Ti if AMD’s latest cards manage to beat the more powerful 16GB RTX 4080 or even come close to Nvidia’s top RTX 4090 cards. Nvidia is about to launch its RTX 4080 16GB model next week, priced from $1,199.
