NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition to launch with minor design changes from predecessor as hands-on photo emerges

Earlier this year, an apparent RTX 4090 Founders Edition prototype surfaced, highlighting minor design changes from current RTX 30 Founders Edition series graphics cards. Subsequently, Moore's Law is Dead leaked RTX 4090 Ti Founders Edition renders, reiterating that NVIDIA will persist with the RTX 30 Founders Edition design language for at least another generation. Now, an alleged photo of the RTX 4080 Founders Edition has emerged sporting different branding to RTX 30 Founders Edition series cards.

Based on findings by VideoCardz, the '4080' font shown in the picture below matches NVIDIA Sans NALA, a font that NVIDIA has introduced on its website. It remains to be seen why NVIDIA has changed from the font used on the RTX 30 series, beyond separating the 'RTX' brand and the graphics card's model number. As far as we can tell, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition is a dual-slot graphics card with the same centre-mounted power connector as its predecessor.

Incidentally, @harukaze5719 noticed that NVIDIA has changed the fan blade design between RTX 30 and RTX 40 Founders Edition graphics cards. Seemingly, NVIDIA has mounted each fan blade at a more aggressive angle, presumably to improve airflow in one way or another. Additionally, the RTX 4080 Founders Edition may have one fewer fan blade than the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 Founders Edition too, which both feature nine blades. Again, it is unclear why NVIDIA would have made such a minor change at this stage. Currently, NVIDIA is expected to launch the RTX 4080 based on the AD103 GPU with 9,728 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR6X VRAM running at 23 Gbps. An RTX 4080 release date remains unknown, although NVIDIA is expected to arrive in October.

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