AMD is supposedly releasing a Navi-based GPU called the RX 3080. NVIDIA doesn’t like that rumor at all, for obvious reasons (read: RTX 2080). The company has filed multiple trademarks claiming ownership of the numbers 3080, 4080, and 5080 in response, a clear attempt to get AMD’s naming department to show a little more creativity.
You can’t really blame NVIDIA for trying. AMD’s naming scheme would be enough to convince some buyers that their cards were better due to the similar but higher designation. Things would get even more confusing when/if NVIDIA releases their RTX 30-series.
The idea is simple, you see two products on a shelf and you look at the numbers. X370 must be better than Z270; the number is bigger, right? It’s a simple marketing tactic, and it makes sense for AMD to reuse it within the graphics card market. AMD’s naming schemes have moved from RX 580 to RX Vega 64 to Radeon VII; it’s not like AMD has a defined branding scheme to follow within the GPU market anymore, so why not piggyback on NVIDIA? NVIDIA even went to the effort of changing GTX to RTX on the high-end, simply begging to be confused with AMD’s established RX graphics lineup.