There’s a lot to keep up with at the moment when it comes to upcoming graphics cards. With GPU head honchoNvidiagetting ready tolaunch the RTX 3090 Ti soon, a slightly beefier, and no doubt more expensive, version of the already-powerful 3090, not to mention Intel about to enter the race, there’s going to be gaming hardware flying hither and thither with each company vying for the markets' attention. With that, “team green” has quietly launched the 12 GB version of the RTX 3080.
In a report from Tom’s Hardware, there was no “considerable fanfare” when it came toNvidiaannouncing the new card, with the company opting to just update the product page of its website. The specs show that the RTX 3080 12 GB will have, unsurprisingly, 12 GB of VRAM, instead of 10 GB that was built into the original, which launched in September 2020. As many will suspect, it will be a somewhat more powerful version of its non-Ti predecessor, with 8,960 CUDA cores, 30.6 TFLOPS, and a bus width of 384. It will, however, still have the same clock speed as the 3080.
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TheRTX 3080 12 GB was rumored to be announced recently, comprising a series of refreshed graphics cards, similar to the RTX 2060 12 GB which was launched late last year. Sadly, the newly-vamped 2060 12 GB did not meet a lot of expectations, mostly because retailers could not get hold of them, leading to complaints about insufficient stock, with Nvidia promising increased availability towards the end of December 2021.
One thing that some may be wondering is why the company chose to let this one all but fly under the radar. There’s an argument to be made that Nvidia could have easily announced it atthis year’s Consumer Electronic Show, which ran between January 5th and January 8th. Not to mention that, at the time of writing, there’s been no official word about what the MSRP will be, though the report suggests that it will likely be around the $1,000 mark.
On top of this sly launch,Nvidiais currently facing a bit of a merger crisis. With thedeal between Nvidia and Arm being called into question, with governing bodies and huge companies condemning the acquisition of the UK chip firm, team green is not making a lot of friends. The quiet launch of the RTX 3080 12 GB is also likely going to make a few people wonder what the company’s is up to.
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