Nvidia could change the naming scheme in its GeForce graphics card line-up, as it reached the conclusion that the current approach may mislead the customer in terms of graphics performance. Although the change is highly unlikely to happen in the near future, the graphics specialist is munching on the idea of bringing order amongst its large GeForce family.
"It's a challenge that we're looking at right now", said Roy Taylor, vice-president of Content Business Development at Nvidia, quoted by tech website Games Industry. "There is a need to simplify it for consumers, there's no question... we think that the people who understand and know GeForce today, they're OK 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", he continued.
While hardware enthusiasts and tech journalists have no problem in distinguishing between various graphics card models and configurations, the average user is less likely to match a certain card name with its graphics performance without looking it up on the Internet.
Nvidia's nomination scheme is pretty straightforward as far as the GPU series are concerned. The real complications occur when the user has to choose between graphics models, such as GS, GT, GTX, GE and GSO. For instance, a graphics card built with the 7800 graphics core can deliver more computing power than an 8400 counterpart. However, the additional model prefixes do not detail on the actual graphics performance and Nvidia could use the number of shader units instead, for instance.
Nvidia is not the only company to have messed up the whole numbering process.
AMD made the same mistake with its processors, which led to significant confusion when compared to Intel's counterparts. AMD's previous naming system would distinguish the CPUs by family and clock frequency (Athlon XP 1700+, for instance), but it lost significant ground on the processor market.
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