Nvidia recently introduced new graphics cards GeForce RTX 4000 with the architecture of Ada Lovelace at very safe prices. However, while the top-end RTX 4090 has scored well with customers despite its very steep $1599 price, the same cannot be said for the slower RTX 4080. While the RTX 4090 has a generous 16384 CUDA cores, the RTX 4080 has to make do with just 9728 cores. The more powerful model thus brings a 68% higher core count and, in practice, usually around 40% more performance. But the RTX 4080 is not much cheaper and we are faced with a rather unprecedented situation. Usually, the absolute top end doesn’t bring much extra performance, but tends to be significantly more expensive, here it’s the other way around. The more powerful variant offers much more, but the surcharge is slightly lower, so the cheaper card is too expensive. People prefer to pay extra for the ultimate.
After all, the standard price of the RTX 4080 should officially be 1199 USD (in practice, however, often over 1500 USD and EUR), which means that the RTX 4090 is a third more expensive, but the difference in performance is slightly greater. The high price of this model can also be seen in the price development of the series from the eighties. The GTX 980 and GTX 1080 were $549, the GTX 2080 and RTX 3080 went up to $699, and now there’s a huge leap for the RTX 4080 to $1199 (but let’s face it, even the RTX 3080 with 12GB of memory was quite expensive). If you look at us, for example, Alza stocks Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4080 16GB OC cards for CZK 42,990 including VAT and they were sold between 20 and 50 units. Nvidia is said to have shipped 130,000 chips for the RTX 4090 and 30,000 chips for the RTX 4080 so far (but that doesn’t mean that many cards have been manufactured and delivered to stores and sold).
