Nvidia to Reimburse Board Partners for Rebranded RTX 4080 12GB

In the context: Now that Nvidia has “launched” the RTX 4080 12GB, many are asking if it will pay the bills of AIB partners who have already done packaging for the already canceled card. The company will be reimbursing the costs, according to a new report, although it appears that the green team will not cover the cost of all expenses.

A few days ago, Nvidia decided that launching a card with 4GB less VRAM, 25% fewer CUDA cores, and a narrower memory bus than the RTX 4080 16GB at $900 was a bad idea. Pretty much everyone agreed that this is essentially the RTX 4070 under a different name, which is almost twice as expensive as the RTX 3070 launched two years ago at $500. It looks like the bad publicity has gotten too much for Nvidia, leading to a so-called card phase-out, which the company blames on consumer confusion about having two cards with the same RTX 4080 designation.

Pulling a card in advance of its release will cost board partners a lot of money. Not only will they have to destroy/dispose of the RTX 4080 12GB packaging, but also repackage the cards in new, recycled boxes under whatever new name Nvidia chooses, re-glue/repaint them, and flash the BIOS to change the name. You also need to consider labor costs.

Based on YouTube channel Gamers Nexustwo major AIBs have confirmed that Nvidia is subsidizing all or at least part of the costs associated with the rebrand.

The RTX 4080 12GB is expected to become the RTX 4070 and be priced below the current $900 – and hopefully without any BIOS downgrading. This will leave questions as to what will happen to the originally planned RTX 4070, but Nvidia could try to work around that by renaming the RTX 4080 12GB RTX 4070 Ti.

Nvidia is highlighting that the RTX 4080 16GB will still launch on November 16th. With the time it takes for the RTX 4080 12GB rebrand and relaunch to be expected, we won’t know details about the new name and launch date until CES in January. .