Coco-Cola blew a $50 million marketing budget in 2004 with the botched launch of its new C2 beverage. The fiasco was used as a case study for reasons why businesses fail by the Harvard Business Review, which concluded that a brand should “test the product to ensure the differences will sway buyers.” Nvidia is currently in a similar situation with its GeForce RTX 4080 series GPUs, which it released in two flavors. The lower-end model had 12GB of graphics memory and cost $899, while the 16GB model cost $1,199.
Nvidia has decided to cancel the 12GB model of the GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card, just a few weeks before its market release, claiming a naming blunder. The company stated in an official blog post that “the RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named correctly.” According to Nvidia, “having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing.” Despite the abrupt decision, the company remains on track to release the GeForce RTX 4080’s 16GB graphics memory variant on November 16.
Evading the storm in advance
On the surface, Nvidia’s decision to cancel the entry-level variant of the GeForce RTX 4080 GPU appears to be a calculated marketing move designed to avoid confusion among buyers eager to get their hands on the hot new graphics-crunching machine. However, the cheaper variant was not well-received at launch, owing to the fact that the differences between the 12GB and 16GB trims of the aforementioned card go beyond just graphics memory.
The RTX 4080 GPU’s 16GB model had 9728 CUDA cores, and its official performance metrics, as listed in Nvidia’s press release, were 780 Tensor-TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader-TFLOPs. The number of CUDA cores was reduced to 7680 in the 12GB version, while raw firepower figures were 639 Tensor-TFLOPs, 92 RT-TFLOPs, and 40 Shader-TFLOPs. It also had a smaller memory interface width (192-bit as opposed to 256-bit) and drew less power from the GPU.
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Many enthusiasts were disappointed by the performance disparity and labeled it a cash grab, while others pointed out that the 12GB RTX 4080 GPU should have been released as the GeForce RTX 4070 or a lower-end model. Nvidia appears to have learned a bitter lesson ahead of the RTX 4080 GPU’s wide market launch and has decided to cancel the 12GB memory configuration.
