I’m sure that NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang has nothing but good intentions postponing review embargos for the RTX 4080 Super to its launch date following the catastrophic flop that was the RTX 4070 Ti Super.
NVIDIA has chosen to postpone the reviews for the RTX 4080 SUPER by one day. This decision is not related to any driver issues but rather NVIDIA proclaims that this stems from “complications with the shipments of RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition cards to reviewers.”
Because apparently many reviewers did not receive their samples on time, with some only receiving them over the weekend and others just today. But I highly doubt that.
Since their announcement at CES 2024, two out of the three RTX 4000 SUPER graphics cards have officially launched, with the RTX 4070 Super providing the most substantial uplift in performance for its lonesome $600 price tag while the RTX 4070 remains to be worthless despite a $50 price reduction.
AMD doesn’t really have anything to counteract the RTX 4070 Super, barring the Radeon RX 7900 GRE which remains to be a European exclusive product, however of course if a product isn’t available for purchase in America then it doesn’t actually exist.
Regardless, the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is currently being sold for the low sum of $479 on Newegg currently and provides greater performance and increased memory capacity versus NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 for an impressive $60 savings.
To combat the RTX 4070 Ti Super, AMD instead decided to temporarily discount its RX 7900 XT to an impressive $710, it can still be had for just $720 however, as the most anticipated graphics card amongst the new RTX SUPER trio ended up being a worthless disgrace, providing single digit percentage uplifts in performance versus the standard RTX 4070 Ti, and a well ways off from reaching the levels of an RTX 4080.
Despite coming equipped with the same AD103 core, albeit cut down versus the RTX 4080, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER was touted as offering near enough performance to its outgoing stablemate and crucially offering consumers 16GB of VRAM for a marginally lower inflated figure of $800.
However it wasn’t to be as launch reviews showcased how abysmal the GPU is in terms of gaming performance, no doubt thanks to the fact that the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is only equipped with 48 MB of L2 cache as opposed to the 64 MB present on the RTX 4080.
Overall average gaming performance figures shown that the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Considering how it remained slower than AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT by a handful of percentages despite costing more money and offering less VRAM for the privilege.
And now we’re waiting for the very last of the trio, the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, the most disappointing card announced featuring the worst increase in specifications out of all three of them.
It’s quite convenient that NVIDIA decided to delay the review embargoes by a full day, aligning with the RTX 4080 SUPER’s release date on January 31st. This tactic is reminiscent of how video game companies often push back review embargos until the day of release when their games are of poor quality.
For instance, Rocksteady withheld game codes for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League entirely, mainly due to the negative reception associated with their progressive fan fictional fever dream, as the game inevitably launched to a negative reception upon release.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Meanwhile nobody is criticizing NVIDIA, by far the largest corporation when it comes to conventional graphics cards in the DIY sector. The RTX 4080 SUPER was always posed to be an embarrassing product, offering a meager 5% increase in CUDA core figures alongside a 2.7% increase in effective memory bandwidth.
After the underwhelming reception of the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, NVIDIA seems keen on minimizing the potential backlash surrounding the $1000 RTX 4080 SUPER.
Despite its minimal performance improvement, which could very well see the GPU fall behind AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which is currently available for $940 on Newegg, and could see a further drop in price following the launch of the RTX 4080 SUPER.
