Unlaunched Nvidia RTX 4080 12 GB takes on the RTX 3090 Ti in leaked benchmarks, no match for the mammoth RTX 4090

Nvidia's initial announcement of the US$899 RTX 4080 12 GB came under heavy criticism with many rightly feeling that the card should have been really called the RTX 4070. This led to Nvidia "unlaunching" the card, but there is no official confirmation yet as to how it would eventually make it to the market. Nevertheless, the card did make its way into the hands of a few testers and we now have what could be the first benchmarks from the unlaunched RTX 4080 12 GB.

This information comes via user panzerlied at the Chiphell forums, who seems to have tested the alleged RTX 4080 12 GB with 3DMark and AIDA64. The card's name is eclipsed in the provided AIDA64 screenshot, but we get to see that it has 60 compute units (7,680 CUDA cores). It is also shown to reach 42 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance. 

The OP also posted scores from 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, Speed Way, Fire Strike Ultra, DirectX Raytracing and Nvidia DLSS runs. Apart from synthetic benchmarks, panzerlied also posted results of a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark showing the card achieving 67.52 average fps at 4K in the Ray Tracing Ultra preset with DLSS On. The system seems to be based on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU.

In 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the alleged RTX 4080 12 GB scored 10,794 points in the Graphics component of the test. This is about 3.79% lower than the RTX 3090 Ti, which manages to score 11,220 points in our testing using the same processor (see image below).

In Fire Strike Ultra, Nvidia's unlaunched card amasses 13,472 points in the Graphics sub-score. Once again, this is nearly 4% lower than the RTX 3090 Ti's performance in this test.

3DMark's latest Speed Way benchmark shows the RTX 4080 12 GB scoring 5,382 points. The average RTX 3090 Ti is about 9% is this benchmark, according to 3DMark's official ranking list.

The top dog RTX 4090 is way ahead of the RTX 4080 12 GB with leads of 85.5% in Fire Strike Ultra and 80% in Time Spy Extreme.

While there is not much reason to doubt these scores themselves, it helps to note that the RTX 4080 12 GB has been officially canceled by Nvidia. Access to these cards and even appropriate drivers is a bit sketchy, so it helps to take these results with a pinch of the proverbial salt. 

That being said, the RTX 4080 12 GB is expected to eventually make it to market as some form of an RTX 4070, hopefully at a lower price than the original announcement. If true, a performance that is more or less in line with a US$1,999 MSRP RTX 3090 Ti is definitely a welcome proposition.

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