If you’re in a market for new graphic card, pay attention to how NVIDIA is marketing the latest RTX 4080 series graphic cards.
Everywhere it’s being plastered how NVIDIA launched RTX 4090, RTX 4080 12GB and RTX 4080 16GB. And to a casual consumer, just going with model that only has 4GB of RAM less but costs 300 bucks less. But reality is, it’s not just memory capacity despite NVIDIA making you believe that way.
RTX 4080 16GB:
CUDA Cores: 9728
Memory bus: 256bit
RTX 4080 12GB:
CUDA Cores: 7680
Memory bus: 192bit
What this means is that you’re not just buying same card with less memory. No, you’re buying ENTIRELY DIFFERENT graphic card. Some are even poking the idea that this 12GB model is suppose to actually be RTX 4070 or even lower, but NVIDIA, in an attempt to jack up prices intentionally positioned it this way, so they can cut down actual RTX 4070 when it comes out even more and still charge insane price for it.
I’m not going to lie, NVIDIA makes quite a lot of really good tech. And I like new tech. But I just can’t get past how shamelessly they are going out ripping of people by intentionally make their products deceptive to casual consumers. Especially after we’ve all been saying to everyone how crazy memory capacities are meaningless for most users…
So, just buy RTX 4080 16GB straight away and call it a day? Not quite. My advance right now is, just wait for AMD to launch their Radeon RX 7000 series and then see. The whole DLSS 3 4x performance promise sounds great, but never buy anything based on a promise, because DLSS 3 may end up depending on implementation and it’s questionable if it’ll just instantly work in all DLSS 2 powered games. If not, that means you’ll again have to wait for ages to get that promise.
And RTX 4000 series cards come with hefty baggage. Literally. Their heatsinks are absolutely insane in size. We’re talking 3+ slots being a standard now. Power consumption has also been increased so you better have a good power supply. And of course, jacked up prices across the range. Which NVIDIA always plays it off conveniently by what I can only assume intentionally leaking way higher prices before launch and when launch of new product comes, they announce somewhat lower price, but still higher than for last generation and everyone is like “wow, I was expecting it to be 2000€ for RTX 4090, but it’s just 1600€ now, that’s not so bad”. It’s fucking clever, I’m not going to deny it. Make people mentally prepare for the worst with ridiculous prices through “leaks” and then announce lower price that’s still higher than last time and people will be more willing to accept the jacked up price. Fuckin clever. And fucking deceptive, just like 12GB and 16GB memory capacity on RTX 4080…
Just wait for AMD to release RX 7000. It can only get better for everyone if people just wait for competition. I’m not expecting RTX 4000 cards to suddenly drop 500€ in price if AMD beats them badly, but anything helps. So, lets wait and see.
Angry Sheep Blog 
That be nVidia for you. Yeah 4080 12GB is just to cover for high price they wanted to give to 4070. Ada is generation that missed the whole economic situation by a long shot. Designed in time where nVidia expected it to release in times of abundance, when money is plenty and they can go all out on performance because no one cares about power or anything else. So yeah, AMD has another golden opportunity. Hopefully they don’t screw it up by following nVidia, since that is what they have been doing since RDNA. Plus nVidia has another problem, they expected mining boom to last forever and now it crashed, they got ton of Ampere lying around and market that is or is about to get flooded with used cards. Same issue as AMD had, hence why they didn’t replace RX580 for so long till 5600XT came. And now nVidia has same issue and I got feeling they will keep delaying anything below 4080 till Ampere stock is low enough. And 4080 12GB is victim of that, got feeling price could have been lower, if there was no Ampere stock they want to incentivize you into buying. But I got feeling there will be plenty of people who will eat their crap and call it chocolate, like they did when nVidia called 3090 as Titan, despite not having anything in common with Titan, except price.
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