The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 should be an extremely performant graphics card capable of running games with high frame rates at resolutions such as 4K, but it’ll need a good chunk of VRAM to fulfil that potential. Now, it seems that team green is currently working on two models, each with different levels of GDDR6X memory.
New leaks from Twitter user Zed_Wang allege that reference designs for both a 12GB and 16GB model of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 are being mulled over, each with a unique PCB (printed circuit board) design. It’s unclear whether this means we can expect the company to release two SKUs of the GPU, but it does at least indicate that we could see a welcome VRAM bump versus the RTX 3080.
If Nvidia hopes to take on AMD in the race for the best graphics card, releasing the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 with 16GB of VRAM would be the correct route to take, in my opinion. Radeon RX 6000 series pixel pushers already offer this much GDDR6 memory, which may be slower than GDDR6X but capacity arguably matters more when it comes to gaming at higher resolutions.
We don’t yet know if AMD RDNA 3 GPUs will feature the faster memory found on current generation Nvidia graphics cards, but it’s certainly in team green’s interest to arm the RTX 4000 series every advantage it can.