Friday, March 5th 2010
NVIDIA Blames OEMs for GeForce 300 Rebranding
NVIDIA is weeks away from unveiling its GeForce GTX 400 series, which until a few weeks ago, was expected to be the GeForce GTX 300, by the media. Expecting that nomenclature didn't need rocket science. However, NVIDIA changed it with releasing as many as a dozen and a half SKUs in the so-called GeForce 300 series based on existing GT21x GPUs, with not much fanfare. The company got a little candid with Bit-Tech.net in an interview, in admitting that pressure from OEMs forced NVIDIA to 'create' GeForce 300 series, because OEMs wanted "something new" on their specs sheets, if they were to opt for NVIDIA's mGPUs over those from AMD, which already support DirectX 11, under the Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series. Most of these rebrands, according to the company, are specific to the OEMs, and will not be released by board partners to the retail market.
Source:
Bit-Tech.net
34 Comments on NVIDIA Blames OEMs for GeForce 300 Rebranding
In your rebranding scheme, you have 9800GX2 as a rebrand of 9800GTX+? How is a dual PCB, dual GPU card a rebrand of a single PCB, single GPU card? Other examples there include variations in the number of available shader processing units and available memory bandwith. Also improved chips were also introduced when they changed the manufacturing process from 65nm to 55nm and now to 40nm. Also of note is the DX10 and DX10.1 compliancy. Some of the models support advanced power management schemes, that the others do not.
There are plenty of differenciating features to warrant most of the model names. Just a couple of your examples are actual rebrands of the same product.
if I was playing the revised/rebranding game I would have done it something like this
G92
8800GS>rebranded>9600GSO>revised>9600GSO512>rebranded>GT330(OEM)
8800GT>revised>9800GT>rebranded>GTS240(OEM)>rebranded>GT330(OEM)
8800GTS512>revised>9800GTX+>rebranded>GTS150(OEM)>revised>9800GTX+>revised/rebranded>GTS250\\\9800GX2
Soon enough, they will blame their own R&D staff for having sex in company labs.
You can't call a GPU the same thing on a spec sheet when you have lowered its power draw or added a few features. The Nvidia optimus designs are hardly a rebrand and they are mobile GTX 3xx series BTW.