Do it quickly at the expense of quality: Understand, Nvidia is releasing a new graphics card today. Kind of new. Upgrading might be a better term, but there’s a new version of the RTX 3080 on shelves today. Now, for those who have tried buying an RTX 3080 for the past couple of years at something that looks reasonably priced, will likely raise an eyebrow at another new product using the same GA102 silicon – especially a more expensive product. – and although this is a bit of a problem, it is the least of our concerns.
The “new” GeForce RTX 3080 12GB launched today, but you’re unlikely to find a single review anywhere telling you about its performance. This is because Nvidia has deliberately blocked all of the Day 1 reviews. It’s hard to say why, and as far as we can tell, it makes very little sense, although we do have a theory.
But before we get to that, let’s take a step back …
About 4 weeks ago, the first AIB partners started contacting us to let us know about several product releases in January, including a new version of the RTX 3080 with 12 GB of VRAM. At the time, I was presented with a typical NDA to sign that would ensure we had a sample before the public release, so that we could test and let you know in advance what the product was. Standard stuff there.
Of course, I signed the NDA because it in no way prohibits us from shitting on any product if necessary, and you’ve seen us do this to countless products from multiple brands over the years. Now, I was told at the time that we would have samples on hand about a week before the product was released. Again, this is pretty standard, in fact a week is often the best of times.
MSI managed to get us their massive Suprim X card a week ago, so we were on track to deliver a detailed review today. After spending three consecutive days of pure benchmarking updating our results for previously released products, I reached out to Nvidia on January 5 to find out when the trial driver would be available.
I was quickly told that they would respond to me with this information.
Two days later we didn’t hear a thing and it was now Friday January 7th, only 4 days before release if you include the weekend. I reached out again and at that point Nvidia informed me that there would be no evaluation pilot, but the reviewers would have to wait until the product was released to the public, after which they could download the public version driver and use it.
This means there is no day one review, and it will likely be a few days before the first detailed reviews appear online. This caught us and the Nvidia partners completely off guard as we all expected to deliver content to you from day one. For me personally, this is not a problem. The deadlines suck, and frankly, I enjoyed spending the weekend with my family rather than working long hours on a 12GB RTX 3080 magazine. In that sense, I’m not at all upset. But I’m annoyed at how pointless and shady this move is.
Note that without a compatible driver, it is impossible to test the graphics card. Existing drivers won’t work, at least not without modification, which for a new GPU setup is likely a complex process. For Nvidia, on the other hand, it is easy to provide the driver in advance and it is standard practice to have their new products tested and revised before the launch date.
The truth is, the RTX 3080 12GB won’t bring us any surprises. It has a few more cores and extra bandwidth / memory capacity, which in performance terms should be somewhere between the stock RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti. So why the Nvidia shenanigans then?
We believe the reason for this is that Nvidia expects this release to receive mostly negative feedback from critics, especially those who were tough on the useless 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti, which were the most critical reviews. more credible. Now you might be thinking, “Come on, like Nvidia cares now… they can literally free everything up and gamers / scalpers / miners will take it in the blink of an eye,” and while the latter is true, I think Nvidia cares.
In my experience over the past decade, Nvidia is extremely sensitive to criticism, and this has become particularly evident since the release of Turing (aka RTX 20 series). Nvidia wants to avoid a flood of mostly negative GeForce reviews on the net, even in today’s market.
But why could the RTX 3080 12GB reviews be negative? Keep in mind that as this opinion column goes live (video here), I haven’t used or tested the card yet, although I have had it on hand for a week now.
It all comes down to price and availability.
The original GeForce RTX 3080 was released in September 2020 and was supposed to be the best GeForce version in years (we gave it a score of 90/100), but it ended up being a huge disappointment due to low availability and exorbitant prices. With loyal fans literally lined up to get their hands on one, Nvidia hasn’t done anything substantial to help them over the past 2 years.
Don’t even bother telling me about LHR cards or direct sales, both of which were little more than marketing stunts. The fact that Nvidia continued to segment the GA102 lineup with higher margin parts, while mostly abandoning the RTX 3080 speaks volumes, and the 12GB model is a continuation of that.
Rather than increasing the supply of the more affordable RTX 3080, which could potentially help drive prices down, Nvidia, as you might expect, opted for a more expensive RTX 3080, after, of course, a Even more expensive RTX 3080 Ti.
In other words, the 12GB RTX 3080 version is no different from the RTX 3080 Ti. Nvidia is just looking to maximize their profit, but now they want to have their cake and eat it too, and by that I mean they want to screw up their customers are as much as the market will allow while getting as little media feedback as possible.
Like the RTX 3080 Ti, the 12GB 3080 is a price reset for the GA102. Charging $ 700 for the RTX 3080 silicon was a mistake for Nvidia, and increasing the MSRP to just over 70% for the 3080 Ti was the first step in correcting that mistake.
Recently, they quietly relaunched the RTX 2060 with a 12GB model. Again, no criticism, and perhaps more concerning, no MSRP, allowing Nvidia to dynamically adjust prices based on what the market will offer. . I hate to say it, but I think they go with the same plan for the 12GB 3080.
When asked just days before release, what the expected MSRP would be, Nvidia quickly responded with “We have nothing to announce at this time.” Suggesting to me that we may not get an MSRP at all, or in the best case scenario it will be $ 1000 and up.
At this point, it’s obvious that these companies don’t care about the players, or more specifically, their customers. Whether it’s Nvidia, AMD, or Intel they never did, they just care about the profits – shocking, I know – but the way some people behave, defending Nvidia every moment, you’d think that these societies exist only to please them.
Nvidia deserves all the negative press that is expected to make its way because of this decision to delay and even remove reviews. At the end of the day, it’s fishy and anti-consumer, and perhaps arrogant as well. But I’m sure that in trying to minimize the media coverage, they only amplified the negative coverage.
I should also clarify that Nvidia agrees with the reviews. They have allowed their partners to taste the menu, but they specifically only want these reviews. after consumers can buy them. They don’t completely block reviews; they want to delay content until after their own ad and post to control the story, while still making it look like they’re playing well with reviews.
Additionally, I should note that we don’t believe reviewers deserve pre-access to products, and for many other companies there are no pre-release assessments. But it is precisely the process change for this product that is fishy. Customers are used to reviews before or on release date, and this process is deliberately changed just to make this product prevent that from happening.
We have done our part in bringing this story to light, now it’s up to you, the community of enthusiasts, to push back. Of course, we’ll have a detailed review in a few days as well, so be on the lookout for that.
