macnn/electronista
09/25/2008, 4:30pm, EDT
Thursday, September 25thNVIDIA to rebrand, update GeForce in winter
NVIDIA today is said to be planning a substantial upgrade to its hardware at the start of 2009 that will also significantly overhaul its years-old naming scheme. A series of video chipsets built on a smaller, 45 nanometer manufacturing process should run faster and cooler than existing 55 nanometer and larger parts. As hinted by the launch of the GTX 200, however, the company will reportedly drop its increasingly complex scheme used for the 8- and 9-series cards to more clearly reflect the intended performance level of each card.
In the proposed approach, GTX would be reserved for the highest-end gaming and performance-oriented cards; GS and GT would apply to mainstream and gaming mid-range cards, while G alone would refer to budget hardware. The transition is said to be starting by the end of the year and would rebadge the 9400 GT as the G100 and change the 9500 GT through 9800 GT to become the GT120 through GT150.
The change parallels a similar move that AMD faced as its ATI Radeon line was faced with becoming too complex, resulting in the current Radeon HD line.
Filed under: peripherals, digital imaging
Other story tags: NVIDIA, AMD, GeForce, ATI, Radeon
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In other words
It's a fancy way to restart the graphics generation counter at 1 again.
naming schemes
I never understood the idiocy of naming schemes used by tech manufacturers. Why not just emulate Apple and name the lines meaningful names then differentiate models with simple integers.
Performance 50, 80, 100
Workstation 50, 80, 100
Professional 50, 80, 100
would make this rediculous game alot easier to follow for many users.
Nah
That's no fun. Don't you just love trying to figure out if 8600GT is better than 8600GS or 8600GTS or...
Besides, don't board manufacturers run identical chipsets at different clock speeds? So we'd be back to square one. When is a 150 faster or slower than a 150? Or maybe an underclocked 150 from one manufacturer is slower than an overclocked 120 from another. We need objective, verifiable performance measurements printed on every card rather than just model numbers.