GTS250 Reviews

[trinibwoy]

NVIDIA's take on this is also flawed in that it treats customers like idiots and underlines the fundamental issue we have. Do I need a card with a new name on it to believe that it is worthy of my purchase, or can I go read reviews comparing the hardware and learn for myself whether or not any card (regardless of the name) fills my need? Maybe this name change is for people who don't know anything about graphics hardware then. In that case the thing that "sells" the card is the simple fact that NVIDIA has convinced someone that this part is an affordable version of a card from their latest line of products. Saying they need a name change to maintain current naming is essentially admitting that the only reason the name needs to be changed is to mislead uninformed people.

I understand the frustration but this justification doesn't make sense to me. The GTS 250 IS an affordable version of a card from Nvidia's latest line. There's no misleading happening there. G92 and GT200 are not very different architecturally, at least in ways that would matter to the end consumer. So while it might be easy to ask everyone to go brush up on reviews, the vast majority of folks shopping for a $150 card have neither the time nor interest to do so. Nvidia completely mucked up the model number transition but it had to be done. Many people would have been happy if Nvidia had taped out new chips with similiar capabilities to G92 but that would make no sense in terms of cost to Nvidia or benefit to the consumer.

They have also clearly told us that naming will no longer be attached to GPU architecture, but that vendors may somehow still indicate architecture on the box if they so choose. If nothing else, the feature list and specifications will be a guide.

This is scary though. It's one thing to bungle a model number transition but to adopt this nonsense as an official policy is a recipe for disaster. So should we now expect lower range GTS/X 3xx parts to be DX10 GT2xx derivatives?