Nvidia Plans to Simplify Confusing Product Line

I know this isn't financially viable, but I think they should drop the low end cards completely. As an indy game developer, I've noticed a huge number of people who just buy a whatever from Dell and it comes with an 8300 and Vista and the result is the damn thing is not even capable of running the Torque engine at a decent frame rate.

"Nvidia" should = games. It should not be possible to buy an Nvidia card that does not kick ass at games. "Nvidia" should not appear on anything that is not a game machine.

they had to because their next generation would have been 10600, 10800, etc

What they need to do is have cards named based on their performance class first and their generation second. For example, instead of the 8800 GT and the 9600 GT you'd have something like the GeForce Advanced 8 and the GeForce Basic 9.

Are you guys serious? It really isn't that hard to figure out. If you would spend the amount of time complaining about it to actually understand the system, you would have it figured out in no time.

It doesn't matter what the name is anyways, when purchasing a video card you should select 3 or 4 in your price range and then look at all the benchmarks you can on tomshardware, etc. and then decide which is the best fit.

So, pretend you have a minute to read this:

Geforce 8600 GTS.

The "8" is the series number. It is a Geforce 8 series. The second number is a "6". That designates it as a midrange card. "4" and below are lowrange cards. "5" and "6" are midrange with 6 of course being better than a 5. If it is "8" or "9" that is a high range card. These have comparable technolgies.

After that is a suffix and this further ranks the card:

LE
GS
GT
GTS
GTX
Ultra
GX2

I haven't seen anyone hit this yet, why is there a $400 price difference between a 8800 and an 8800 ultra... They are the same card using the same circuitry, the only difference is one chip was shown to work a little more efficiently and could sustain a faster clock rate. THATS WORTH $400...

When you realize that your paying a lot more money for the exact same circuit card, it really sinks in what a silly practice it is.

to me it's a matter of mixing numbers and suffixes together. It adds that extra layer of confusion I guess. If it was just simply 8800 or Geforce 8GTX, it would be all good. But the fact that it's 8800 gtx, 8600 gt etc... I think confuses people. It's another thing as well that cards with lower numbers SHOULD NOT out perform cards wtih higher number based on reason alone. It doesn't make sense to the consumer and his pocket. I have an 8800 GTS 640 and after some further research following my purchase I found out that the 8800gt out performs it because of a new chipset. If that's the case then what's the point of any demarcation. Why not: Geforce Good, Geforce Great, Geforce Awesome. There, done.

Personally, I'd like to seem the retire the GeForce moniker. It has served them for 9 generations now. It's time to move on. They should start over with a new, more simple nomenclature.

Well at least theyre acknowledging it. I dunno how much theyll actually change though.

I guess people that brought us this great GeForce labeling system will be the same ones now creating a new one. I can hardly wait.

When Intel did this, it made things more confusing.

Geforce light, gaming, studio, pro? The numbers are confusing.. Maybe they should change that as well.. Good time for name change.

"We think that the people who understand and know GeForce today, they're okay with it--they understand it. But if we're going to widen our appeal, there's no doubt that we have to solve that problem."

I would like to meet these people. This shit has been way more confusing then it has ever been. There is always constant confusion in the chatties about this crap. I want some of the weed he is smoking.

How about a SPEED CHART on the Nvidia website showing the performance benchmarks of their products?

Hmm. The more I think about it, Nvidia probably makes a LOT of money by confusing their customers into buying inferior products for more money than they're worth. I'd be surprised if they changed the naming scheme anytime soon.

What would make the most sense is if they use the simple notion of "bigger number always equals better". Maybe I'm trying to be too simple about this but it would seem to me that anything in the 9 series should be better than anything in the 8 series.

As I understand it, a 9600 is basically on par with an 8800. And these new 9400/9500's will be weaker than an 8800. That shouldn't be the case, I don't think - if you call the card 9000something, it should be better than the 8800. Make a card marginally better than the 8800 and call it the 9000 if you want.

And obviously this is how the consumers think, even the smart ones. Every so often I see someone on the Shack say "WTF? The 9600 is weaker than the 8800GTX2?" or whatever. The truly hardcore know the difference, or know how to research the difference. It's everyone else Nvidia needs to market to.

geForce10800-DDR4-DX11-XTS-SLI-TRLI-QLI-PWEEee

Video Cards should be like cars, there should be base models with a name and little use of a numbering system. Then they release it based on a year model and each of those models have a specific tier from cheapest to midrange to luxury.

This has me shaking my head. It took this long? Gee shaggy, do you think having 20 brands of 8800 is confusing to the public?

They should just label it based on the year, with maybe "A, B, C' etc denoting rank from high end to mid range.

Because a BMW 335i MUST be less powerful than a BMW 528i.

CARS, people! They modeled the names after CARS!

Good. Producing like 4 different products every 6-8 months makes things VERY confusing at retail stores.

There should only be two variables, the first being the hardware architecture itself, and second the amount of transistors invested performance-wise. There's also some random extra details like total RAM or type, but those can stay separated.

Right now you have the architecture symbolized by a figure in the thousands, and a total electronic complexity 'value' obnoxiously separated into a number in the hundreds and a two to three character alphabetic tag, as a result of being a useless distinction between a hard limit scope and subvariations akin to economy/luxury branding of cars.

Comparing cards across different hardware architectures is hard...sometimes improvement is slim to none if the testing grounds, the software itself, is designed with no consideration for any programatic features beyond that of the older competing architecture. Comparing DX9 capable cards to DX10 capable cards in a DX9 or even DX7 setting may show clear number-crushing differences, but neglect far too many points to consider. I suspect cards may eventually even evolve in such ways that archaic APIs will show a decrease in performance, as the way we program is radically changed by such strange concept as having as many cores as threads in an application, or perhaps even much more. To that effect, one could argue the following:

1) Represent the architecture change with something catchy. A name, letters, whatever. There's little need to keep obvious chronological consistence with numbers as this changes once every one, two years. Any questions can be easily answered by computer store people, anyone else will find it painfully evident over the net. Bonus points if your naming scheme can be evolved into terms that sound incrementally powerful.

2) Elaborate on the performance of the device with a number, but keep the numbers consistent across architecture changes. Make them proportional to their sheer texel/triangle crunching capabilities. This is not the best of performance indicators, but I bet nVidia can somehow deduct the potential performance out of rendering units/texel/triangle/RAM. Properly used, these things will most likely never go down, until a change so big comes it is unfair to call it a GeForce.

There should be agreed upon benchmarks that all companies use. A car's 0-60 for example. Its not something car makers can really fudge the numbers on.

If you have numbers make them small like 1 or 2 or 3 like Voodoo Cards

And instead of Geforce come up with a cooler name like Rocket 1 which would be like a 9800X2 or something

Rocket 1

Rocket 2

Rocket 3

Keep it simple

Okay, so it took ten years to figure this out?

I don't understand why there are so many damn products. What the fuck do we need with an 8400GS when an 8500GT is a tiny bit faster for about the same price? And the 8600GS just above that? Then the 8600GT, then the 8600GTS?

I mean, it's hard to describe and identify your product with a simple model number, because sometimes those slow cards with the new technology will at least get you into some game in the future, whereas a faster card with older technology can hold you back (I'm looking at you, Bioshock and Radeon X800 card, versus, say, X1300). Still, there's gotta be a better way than having a zillion models.

Plus, the 8600GT runs modern games at HALF the speed of an 8800GT. But hey, it's only "200 less" right? That's why so many 8600GTs get bought.

I seem to recall them doing this with the MX and then it probably didn't sell well because it was associated as a lower-end card.

GeforceX - MX, Standard, Ultra....

This is one step on the right path, if only they would just cut down on releases, fewer cards, more significant jumps between them.