Nvidia is refreshing its RTX 3080 card with a very minor update, giving it 12GB of GDDR6X memory, instead of the 10GB the card launched with. The 10GB of RAM was a major criticism of the original RTX 3080 when it was released, as even in 2020 when it debuted, 10GB wasn't enough to turn on every visual feature at 4K in the most high end AAA games. 12GB should make the card more future proofed, but with RTX 4000 cards coming towards the end of the year, the RTX 3080 12GB may not be as attractive a buy as Nvidia thinks.
Not that the card won't sell though. It goes on sale today without any kind of low hash rate blocks against mining, and it's a top-tier GPU at a time where those are very hard to get. Its pre-orders go live today, but even by the time you read this they'll most likely be sold out (especially if you're on the west coast), as pre-orders are set to begin 3PM Central European Time.
The card will retail for just under 1700 Euros, or around $1,900, almost double the price the RTX 3080 was originally supposed to sell at -- but that card regularly goes for anywhere between $1,500 and $2,000 today.
The new card will have the same 8960 CUDA core and the same clock speeds as the original RTX 3080. The memory is expected to be the same, so performance won't be drastically increased. In reality, the new card will merely not hit the same bottlenecks for video memory that its 10GB counterpart will in the coming years.
If you can afford to wait out this period of crazy prices -- possibly well into 2023 -- then you should. It's madness out there.
