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It's not just that the 12 GB 4080 was a confusing name - it wasn't the same class of card, at all. In previous generations when they've had differing memory si
by Kirby64 4y ago
It's not just that the 12 GB 4080 was a confusing name - it wasn't the same class of card, at all.
In previous generations when they've had differing memory sizes for the same card, that was the ONLY change. So, it was useful for something like CUDA, but usually not for gaming. A specific audience.
For the 4080, the 12GB version has the following changes:
* 12GB VRAM vs. 16GB VRAM (the obvious one from the name)
* 7,680 CUDA cores vs. 9,728 CUDA cores for the 16 GB.
* 192-bit memory bus vs. 256-bit memory bus (understandable, since this scales with memory size... but also probably means the memory itself is slower).
This isn't just a different amount of memory, it is fundamentally a different product and should be marketed as such. Instead it's Nvidia being greedy.
- goosedragons 4y agoThat's not quite true. They've pulled this stunt a few times. Most recently with the 6GB and 3GB versions of the 1060. That was arguably even worse because they did it after the launch.
- MarioMan 4y agoI didn't realize it was this bad, but Wikipedia lists 7 different GTX 1060 chip revisions with 3, 5, and 6 GB variants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_10_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
- Kirby64 4y agoThe 1060 didn't really have significant differences in performance, as far as I can tell. Still bad to do it, but GPU benchmarks appear to put performance hit at ~3% less for the 3GB version. Looks like there's also a 5GB version which has slower clocks... which is about 10% worse... but I assume that's mainly due to clock rate, not the memory or the actual silicon. Those all have the same amount of CUDA cores and processing pipeline, though. Unlike this '4080 12GB'. See: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-GTX-1060-vs-GeForce-GTX-1060-3GB-vs-GeForce-GTX-1060-5GB/3548vs3566vs3923 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-GTX-1060-...
- salawat 4y agoAnother GTX 970-esque abomination sounds like.
- izacus 4y agoWhat?
- ohgodplsno 4y agoThe GTX970 is a fun bit of hardware. It's marketed as a 4GB RAM card. In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago> The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Not even good for that, even just reading the slow VRAM slows down the entire GPU, so you never want to use the last 512MiB.
- izacus 4y agoI owned the 970 for 7+ years and I remember all about that bruahaha. I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day. It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks. And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?