NVIDIA hopes you'll be better able to distinguish its products if it renames them all

by Tim Stevens posted Aug 20th 2009 at 8:33AM

What's in a name? Very little if you're buying computer hardware lately. Back in the day, you could easily compare two CPUs because their names were simply how fast they were -- now you've got series of processors and graphics cards with naming conventions dreamed up by marketing gurus who don't know a front side bus from a school bus. NVIDIA had been shooting for something simple with its G, GT, and GTX lines, but it looks like last year's talk of a re-tooling of its lineup are coming true; all those seemingly straightforward letter prefixes seem set to be dropped in favor of "GeForce" followed by a number. The first to bear this re-branding will be the 40nm, DirectX 10.1 GeForce 210, set to hit the retail channels in October, followed later by the GeForce 230 and GeForce 300. How exactly they all will compare remains to be seen, but we're going to go ahead and speculate that bigger number probablyequals higher cost.