Nvidia has already rebranded its GeForce 8800 GT as the 9800 GT, but has reportedly cancelled plans to rename the GPU again.
Following Nvidia’s highly questionable decision to rebrand its GeForce 9800 GTX+ as the
GeForce GTS 250 last month, it looks as though the company has learned its lesson from the public reaction. According to
DailyTech, the company had similar plans to rebrand the GeForce 9800 GT as the GeForce GTS 240, but has now decided against it.
The site claims to have seen a confidential email from the company in response to
“pressure from frustrated GPU board partners,” which tells its customers to ignore the GeForce GTS 240 brand and instead focus on three types of card bearing the GeForce 9800 GT name. As well as the vanilla GeForce 9800 GT, there is also a GeForce 9800 GT OC and a reduced-power version.
In the same way that the GeForce 9800 GTX was effectively a rebrand of the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS with a few extras, the
GeForce 9800 GT was a rebrand of the GeForce 8800 GT with exactly the same specifications. Both GPUs had 112 stream processors clocked at 1.5GHz, a GPU clock speed of 600MHz, 512MB of 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) GDDR3 memory and support for 2-way SLI.
As such, it was even more of a straight renaming operation than the GeForce 9800 GTX rebrand, which at least offered 3-way SLI support and an increased stream processor clock speed over the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS. However, later models of the 9800 GT were fabricated on a 55nm process rather than the 65nm process used to make the GeForce 8800 GT.
Would you rather Nvidia stuck with the GeForce 9800 GT brand or changed it to the GTS 240 to have a consistent naming strategy? Let us know your thoughts in
the forums.
15 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replymaybe it is to avoid long names? (otherwise, within ten years we've got the "Nvidia ten trilion GT" review on bit-tech.... )
Things have gone so far, that I will buy ATI even if it will be slightly more expensive for the same performance).
^^ they way i feel from this news
im really glad that they wont rename the 8800GT for the THIRD time, its just a shame that it took pressure from board partners to make them realise how stupid their naming conventions have been and are.
What?......:| Ooookkkkkk............ The world has not grouped together and agreed to only buy from ATI. Everybody feels the economic climate in the GPU market. But for people that do buy new cards at the moment both brands are great to have in the PC. "Good day sir"
On the other hand the HD4870 is much cheaper than the GTX 260 last I checked.
Perhaps if they took every card produced in the last 4yrs, and put them in an ordered list, to show performance of the cards, then marketed the ba-jesus out of that, then they might get to a point of starting a new single naming convention. But I guess you sell more cards to people looking for an upgrade by just changing the name, albeit loosing customers that find out the truth afterwards, or that just don't see any gain in their performance.
I just buy whatever comes up in the bit tech monthly round up these days.