DarkMatterAh I see. Apparently 55nm vs 65nm, Tri-SLI, Hybrid SLI and some minor changes to the shaders to improve power consumption, are not enough changes for you.

well - aside from the fab process, SLI support (IIRC in regards to nVidia - I know for sure ATI can) can be handled via drivers . . . everything else is kinda . . . meh.

Sorry, but you don't have a point there, both are guilty of exactly the same, just Nvidia is doing it now and Ati did it in the past, AND (this is a big one) both companies are much more vocal about their chips than in the past, which means Ati did this A LOT more than Nvidia in the past, but you never got told. Nvidia has been vocal about these rebrands, what a poor strategy, if what you want is to fool customers and you tell them what's going on with the new cards. LOL.

true - to an extent. ATI in the past changed their hardware a lot more frequently, but, like I mentioned, they would either slap another suffix onto the series, or release another "spin-off" series. If you look back at ATI's older cards, how many different suffixes did they have for each card series? How many different card series did they release within a 3 year period (ex. 2003-2006)?

nVidia does have quite a lot of cards released during the hey-day as well, but no where near the extent ATI did - ATI's offerings were so prolific it was hard to keep up with. The RV500 alone saw the X1300, X1500, X1600, X1800 and X1900 series, as well as all the different flavours of each (PRO, XT, SE, GT, GTO, GTOr2, XL, XTX, Non-PRO).
true -

imperialreignsame GPUs, yes (or revised), but included hardware changes. X300, X550 and X600 supported GDDR2, whereas the 9550 did not. Memory bandwidth and memory BUS were higher as well (one would reason to believe so, considering the new MEM standard).

Let's say that explains the rebrand from 9550 (RV350) to the X600 (RV380), even though a simple change from DDR to DDR2 (never GDDR2) isn't enough in my book. How do you explain the latter rebranding from RV380 to RV370 (X300, X550) and much later to x1050 (still RV370)?

EDIT: I bet even x1300/pro and x1550 were the same shrinked chip.

Look you can try to bend it as much as you can, fact is Ati just did the same many times, but you just never got told, because the media wasn't so aware or interested back then.

And BTW, the first time apparetly passed unnoticed: www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11867&Itemid=1 <<-- Ati might rebrand NOW too.

IMO what Ati did back then, was even worse, much worse, becasue they even changed the codename a lot of times, so people smart enough to look at the codename of the chip, but not enough to know about hardware itself, could think the higher one was better when, in fact was the same. You can look at the codename in the Nvidia's and easily find are all G92.

DrPepperRadeon 9550 - X1050

Radeon 9550 is a 9600 underneath, but ya i expect the low end cards to be recycled, not much of the mid range or top end.

Most of the X*** series was a R300 based core at heart

btarunrIn the weeks to come, next month to be more precise, NVIDIA will officially rename its G92-based graphics cards series. Amongst the "new" SKUs that have surfaced so far, NVIDIA adds the GeForce GTS 250, or present-day GeForce 9800 GTX+. In a bid to garner support from its partners, NVIDIA issued a circular that includes the following statement:


The GTS 250 model will be accompanied by yet another rebranding: GeForce GTS 240, present-day GeForce 9800 GT and GeForce 8800 GT. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ was released in July 2008, to compete with ATI's Radeon HD 4850. It was an evolution of the GeForce 9800 accelerator, to which it was built on a newer manufacturing process that facilitated higher clock speeds. NVIDIA is likely to choose CeBIT as the ideal launch-pad for its new series of graphics cards.



Source: Expreview

WTF they make great video cards but should be sued.