It's not just that the 12 GB 4080 was a confusing name - it wasn't the same class of card, at all.

In previous generations when they've had differing memory sizes for the same card, that was the ONLY change. So, it was useful for something like CUDA, but usually not for gaming. A specific audience.

For the 4080, the 12GB version has the following changes:

* 12GB VRAM vs. 16GB VRAM (the obvious one from the name)

* 7,680 CUDA cores vs. 9,728 CUDA cores for the 16 GB.

* 192-bit memory bus vs. 256-bit memory bus (understandable, since this scales with memory size... but also probably means the memory itself is slower).

This isn't just a different amount of memory, it is fundamentally a different product and should be marketed as such. Instead it's Nvidia being greedy.