NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB and 4080 12GB Unleashed – See Specs, Price, and Availability

A few hours ago, NVIDIA announced its latest next-generation GPUs based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture. Jensen first introduced the GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, followed by the GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs. Interestingly, there are two variants of the RTX 4080. A 16GB RTX 4080 and a 12GB RTX 4080. Aside from having different memory sizes, their specs are quite different as well. These new GPUs feature 3rd gen RT cores, 4th gen Tensor cores, and NVIDIA DLSS 3.0 exclusively. More on that later. Check out the rest of its features, specs, price, and availability below.

UPDATE2: Check out our review of the MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPRIM X and Zotac GeForce RTX 4080 Trinity OC.

UPDATE: NVIDIA “unlaunched” the RTX 4080 12GB. Read more here…

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 – Up to 4X Faster Than RTX 3080 Ti Thanks To DLSS 3.0

The GeForce RTX 4080 is available in two configurations – the RTX 4080 16GB and RTX 4080 12GB. I’m not sure what’s the reasoning behind this. I guess the “RTX 4070 (Ti)” will only come with 10GB of memory and fewer CUDA cores. We have no idea at this time. The RTX 4080 16GB has 9728 CUDA cores, while the RTX 4080 12GB has only 7680 CUDA cores. However, the RTX 4080 12GB has a slightly higher boost clock speed of 2.61GHz compared to the RTX 4080 16GB’s 2.51 GHz.

According to NVIDIA, both the RTX 4080 16GB and 12GB use Micron GDDR6X memory. And with DLSS 3.0 the 16G variant is 2x as fast in today’s games as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and more powerful than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at lower power. Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 12GB with its DLSS 3.0, is faster than the RTX 3090 Ti. We’ll have to wait for 3rd party reviews to confirm these claims.

Unfortunately, DLSS 3.0 is only available to the new RTX 40 series GPUs. No wonder these new GPUs can pull off up to 4x the performance since the previous RTX 30 series GPUs don’t support DLSS 3.0. It could also consistently deliver over 100 frames per second at 4K-resolution gaming.

The RTX 4080 16GB also draws more power compared to the 12GB version. The 16GB can draw 320W of power, while the 12GB can draw around 285W of power.

GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs New Features

• Streaming multiprocessors with up to 83 teraflops of shader power — 2x over the previous generation.
• Third-generation RT Cores with up to 191 effective ray-tracing teraflops — 2.8x over the previous generation.
• Fourth-generation Tensor Cores with up to 1.32 Tensor petaflops — 5x over the previous generation using FP8 acceleration.
• Shader Execution Reordering (SER) improves execution efficiency by rescheduling shading workloads on the fly to better utilize the GPU’s resources. As significant an innovation as out-of-order execution was for CPUs, SER improves ray-tracing performance by up to 3x and in-game frame rates by up to 25%.
• Ada Optical Flow Accelerator with 2x faster performance allows DLSS 3 to predict movement in a scene, enabling the neural network to boost frame rates while maintaining image quality.
• Architectural improvements tightly coupled with custom TSMC 4N process technology results in an up to 2x leap in power efficiency.
• Dual NVIDIA Encoders (NVENC) cut export times by up to half and feature AV1 support. The NVENC AV1 encode is being adopted by OBS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Discord, and more.

GeForce RTX 4080 vs RTX 3080 Ti Gaming Performance

NVIDIA showed some gaming benchmarks. On the graph below, NVIDIA compared the RTX 4080 vs the RTX 3080 Ti using Microsoft Flight Simulator, Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, and Cyberpunk 2077 (with new RT overdrive). The RTX 4080 is almost 2x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti in Microsoft Flight Simulator and Warhammer 40,000. But the RTX 4080 12GB is only about 1.5x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti in Warhammer. Meanwhile, the 4080 GPUs are 2.5x to 3x faster than the RTX 3080 Ti. This is because the RTX 4080 has DLSS 3.0 and Ray Tracing overdrive in Cyberpunk 2077.

These are most probably cherry-picked and controlled benchmarks. We will have to wait for 3rd party testing and benchmarks to see the true performance of these RTX 4080 GPUs. Although, it’s unfortunate that DLSS 3.0 will not be available on the older RTX 30 and RTX 20 series GPUs.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Pricing and Availability

The GeForce RTX 4080 series will be available in November 2022. The RTX 4080 16GB starts at $1,199, meanwhile the RTX 4080 12GB starts at $899. These GPUs will also be available as custom boards, including stock-clocked and factory-overclocked models, from top AIC providers such as ASUS, Colorful, Gainward, Galaxy, GIGABYTE, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac.

Can’t decide which one to get? See our list of best GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards here.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Specifications