While there was no official announcement from Nvidia, earlier rumors, the newest driver, as well as announcements from the usual Nvidia AIB partners suggest that the launch is official and it is just a matter of time before we see it on retail/e-tail shelves or see the first reviews.

The Geforce RTX 3080 12GB is based on the same 8nm GA102 GPU as the original Geforce RTX 3080, as well as the RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, and the upcoming RTX 3090 Ti. Compared to the previous RTX 3080 that packed 8,704 CUDA cores, or 68 SMs, the new RTX 3080 12GB has 70 SMs enabled, leaving it with 8,960 CUDA cores. This also raises the number of RT cores to 70 as well as the numbers of Tensor cores to 280.

According to Nvidia's own specification page, the Geforce RTX 3080 12GB, which is the official name for the new card, has a slightly higher base clock of 1.44GHz, while Boost clock remained at 1.71GHz.

The biggest update is the 12GB of 19.5Gbps GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit memory interface, leaving it with a higher memory bandwidth of 912GB/s, compared to 760GB/s on the original Geforce RTX 3080 10GB.

Unfortunately, there is no word on the actual MSRP of the RTX 3080 12GB or if we will see the Founders Edition version. We have not been able to find any major listings of the RTX 3080 12GB and according to a few listings in Europe, putting it at around €1,799, it is weirdly close to the RTX 3080 Ti price.

In addition to silently launching the new graphics card in order to prevent early leak reviews, the Geforce 511.17 driver has also just come up online, giving support for the Geforce RTX 3080 12GB, as well as fixing a few issues.

The fixed issues list includes a fix for flickering/disappearing text when 12-bit color is used, a fix for random stuttering/freezing in Detroit Become Human, and some minor HDR and G-Sync issues.

You can find the new Geforce 511.17 driver over at Nvidia's driver support page.