A bit quicker and significantly more affordable
This review will kick off with a complaint about the original GeForce RTX 4080 and its initial price.
Priced at $1199 USD, the GeForce RTX 4080 perfectly displayed the high cost of GPUs in the PC enthusiast world today. It is indeed a solid product, delivering excellent performance and outpacing the RTX 3080 it effectively replaces. However, its performance was so outpaced by the RTX 4090 in the GeForce RTX 40 series lineup that the $400 price difference (in theory, the RTX 4090 is $1599 USD) didn’t make a lot of sense. Or perhaps it’s just me? Am I crazy?
Speaking of craziness, I don’t have an issue with super expensive, top-tier products. There’s a market for them. If NVIDIA were to release a 40 Series TITAN for $2500, the affluent and popular YouTubers would certainly revel in its high-performance capabilities. However, offering a scaled-down AD103 for $1199 seemed so unbelievable and sinister that it didn’t really affect NVIDIA. Sure, the RTX 3080 was priced at $699, so a $1199 price for the RTX 4080 meant a $500 increase from the previous generation, but AMD didn’t exactly take over the high-end market with RDNA 3 either.
However, it seems like the RTX 4080 might not have been selling very well, hence the need for a price cut now. Alternatively, NVIDIA might just want to improve its relationship with gamers. Right, Josh?
