Someone managed to benchmark Nvidia’s now-cancelled RTX 4080 12GB, as per the post on the Chiphell forums. You would be surprised to know that the 3DMak Fire Strike and TimeSpy results barely matched Nvidia’s Ampere-based RTX 3080 12GB; thus, the performance was regrettably quite subpar for an RTX 4080-class GPU especially given that the RTX 4080 12GB was intended to replace the RTX 3080 12GB.
The precise RTX 4080 12GB model that was tested was never made known by the original source. However, there was little left for imagination given all the monitoring data, including core clocks, thermals, and power was present.
Given the performance, you might think the 3080 is up against a lowly GPU, but the 4080 12GB, along with the 4080 16B and 4090, was Nvidia’s entry-level Ada Lovelace GPU when it was first shown at GTC. The 4080 12GB included a 256-bit wide bus, an AD103 chip with 9728 CUDA cores, and 22.6Gbps of GDDR6X memory for a total bandwidth of 717GB/s. Nonetheless, the 4080 12GB model’s extremely unclear naming compared to the RTX 4080 16GB, Nvidia discontinued it after receiving harsh criticism from the community. Despite the labels just implying a capacity difference between the cards, the 4080 12GB has drastically different core specs than the 16GB version.
As per the leak, the 4080 12GB model was clocked at a memory speed of 1,313 MHz and a real-world boost rate of 2,820 MHz. Thermals peaked at a temperature of 72.3C, and hot spots reached 91.2C. The maximum fan speed was 43%. At its highest, power usage can be seen to reach 261W.
This illustrates that the 4080 12GB is significantly weaker than the RTX 4080 16GB and RTX 4090. The clocks are still quite similar to the 4090, but only 262W of power is used instead. GPU-max Z’s TDP of just 91.8% of the total power target proved that the card was not power throttling as a result of a power limit.
The performance is further cemented by the 4080 12GB’s 3DMark results. The 4080 12GB tested only managed to achieve GPU scores of 13,472 in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and 10,794 in TimeSpy Extreme.
These figures equate to marginally greater performance than an RTX 3080 12GB in the exact same benchmarks. Even though the 30 series GPUs in the browser’s results were deliberately overclocked, the 4080 12GB falls exactly between a vanilla RTX 3080 12GB and RTX 3080 Ti.
In the meantime, you could read about how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is trashing the market.
