NVIDIA Throws the Blame on OEMs for Rebranding Practices
Many consumers have been complaining about NVIDIA’s rebranding pracitices as it makes buying a new GPU quite confusing, but NVIDIA claims it’s OEMs who should take the responsibility for the tricks.
At a recent press event, NVIDIA said that it only rebranded its products at the request of large PC OEMs, and most involved products are for OEM market only and would never be seen within the retail space.
Such statements are obviously hardly convincing, as we’ve been troubled by several retail rebrandings. Additionally, it’s unnecessary for the company to appease OEMs in such a way if it actually had new products to sell.
Source: Bit-tech
March 6th, 2010 at 2:14 am
Could the problem be that GPU’s now have a longer life cycle because of their complexity and technical limits? Similar to CPU’s, as they have had longer lifetimes. Take a look at these breakneck development paces. You can’t keep that up forever.
GeForce 256 Launched on August 31, 1999,
+7 months
GeForce 2 Series Launched in April 2000
+10 months
GeForce 3 Series Launched in February 2001
+12 months
GeForce 4 Series Launched in February 2002
+15 months
GeForce FX Series Launched in May 2003 (FX5900 Ultra)
+11 months
GeForce 6 Series Launched in April 2004
+14 months
GeForce 7 Series Launched in June 2005
+17 months
GeForce 8 Series Released on November 8, 2006
+15 months
GeForce 9 Series February 21, 2008
+4 months!!!
GeForce 200 Series 16 June 2008.
+21 months!!!
GeForce 400 Series March 26, 2010
March 7th, 2010 at 1:32 am
The real problem here is that uninformed buyers consider newer hardware to be better
March 7th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
It should always be like that ted. Take a look at ATI, every new hardware they put out since 2006 has always been better than the previous gen, unlike Nvidia who rebrands like crazy. 8000, 9000, 200, 300, and possibly the low 400 series.
March 7th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Yes, but the companies rebrand because they know how the buyers think… for example if ati skipped a generation and did not release anything, buyers would still go for the “new” nvidia cards even though they are old generation hardware with a new name