celcius
This has more cuda cores than the regular 3080. With the way things are now, nvidia can make the gpu dies and if a few cuda cores are defective, just sell it as the lower tier product. If a few more dies are defective, sell it as the lower tier product. RTX 3090 Ti, -> 3090 -> 3080 Ti -> 3080 12gb -> 3080 10gb all use the same die but with lowering amounts of cuda cores. They can make more products and yields have probably improved since Ampere first launched.

McAztec

dejanh
These cards are not making any sense.  Nvidia can barely get out enough of the current cards (in fact, they can't) so why are they bothering launching another 3080 with an extra 2GB of memory.

 
For the 3080 XC3 Ultra gaming the 12GB is 415-ish euro more expensive than the normal one. For the FTW3 Ultra Gaming it is 417.5 euro more expensive. For some reason they are more expensive than the Ti-s, possibly those may get a refresh with a higher MSRP as well.
I've seen some early benchmarks and from what I can tell the 12GB variant is a bit faster than the 10GB, the gains were abysmal though, about 10FPS on average in some games here and there. Not really worth a 400+ euro markup imo.
 
I get that some people say it's more futureproof with the extra 2GB of VRAM and slightly wider bus, and they are correct, however I'd like to point out that it's mostly because the 3080 had little VRAM from the start imo. My old 1080 has 8GB of VRAM, and for some reason so did the 2080/2080S and the 3080 only has 2GB more, admittedly with a much wider bus. So either nvidia thinks that 2GB every few years is enough to keep up, or they didn't put enough from the start (to keep costs down probably) if they re-released it with more. It's likely to be 2nd option as some mentioned new memory chips are now available and the cost went down a bit as supply of memory supposedly increased slightly.
 
It's worth mentioning at this point that from most retailers out here the 3080 cannot be had for less than 1.5k euro, even bottom barrel ones, so nvidia pushed a new set of SKUs out so that they may take that cash rather than let the scalpers do it. I'm torn about this, on one hand it's a cash grab from nvidia which annoys me and sets a bad precedent to be followed by others, on the other hand if normal cards are discontinued soon and these pre-scalped GPUs are all that's left that may put scalpers out of business which I do like. Guess I'll wait for my OG 3080 notification or the 4080 to launch, or maybe Intel/AMD get something cool out. Intel's GPUs can't come soon enough imo, the more competition the better. I wish to see them pull a Ryzen-like move on nvidia.