Unlaunching the 12GB 4080
nvidia.com
nvidia.com
I just don’t see the logic in the naming in any way shape or form.
As opposed to the rest of the 40 series cards?
If you’re looking for a pro card and have the cooling and power to support it (not to mention, the workflow needs that could benefit), that’s great. If you’re a gamer or enthusiast, the price is still high enough (not to mention the other changes you might need to make to your rig to support the card) that the actual delta between the potential and what you’ll actually do with the card means you should probably just stick with either a 3090 that is now half the price, or hold out for the other 4000 series cards if you must get a next-gen card.
It doesn’t apply to every game or every resolution, but there are actual game scenarios where a 4090 makes sense. Price and heat and power and space not withstanding, it’s a meaningful upgrade.
Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking!
There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap.
Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum.
Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable.
Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways.
Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!
The point is that all of this merely requires more resources at runtime, not any additional work on behalf of the developer. So, by allowing limits higher than is practical on hardware at the time of release, the game can scale somewhat better on future hardware. What's the downside?
High-res textures are a different thing, since they actually have to be painted. Or upscaled, I suppose, but that's still code somebody has to write.
Ah, I want to clarify again—I was imagining the developers already had higher quality original textures, which they had downscaled for release. The textures in Assassin's Creed II, for instance, have the look of images that were saved down to a lower resolution from larger originals. But I could be wrong, or even if I'm not, it might be less common nowadays.
As you say, the goal is to include things that only require computational resources at runtime (even an order of magnitude more).
Many buying a Gaming PC will be buying a device that will do double duty and the price differential is best described by the GPU required for work vs play and if we want to truly compare it to console quality we ought to be comparing it to a budget GPU similar in performance to a PS5. For example a $370 nvidia gtx 3060 vs a $500 console.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k400-plus-...
There is a lot of confusion because some people assume turning on DLSS increases settings but it actually lowers quality. Sure DLSS is good enough that most don’t notice, but you can say that about lowering most settings slightly to improve performance.
Which just means better hardware beats DLSS at the same settings.
DLSS 3 still only looks fine on cherry picked screens: “It looks like DLSS 3's weakness lies in hidden geometry, where information is missing between two frames due to geometry overlapping another set of geometry while in motion. This can cause DLSS 3 to "shutter" and output ugly artifacts as it tries to fill in the void of missing detail.” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dlss-3-early-review-rtx-40...
4090 has .28 GP/s/$ at base clock.
Considering this is coming out two years later, I'm not so inclined to call it a bargain.
Because that's the issue isn't it? Everyone wanting for nVidia to just sell those chips for less?
They'll slap 4070Ti or something on it and sell it to you for the same price.
30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.
This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB.
They've also jacked the prices: the 4080 should be $750 and the 4090 should be $1500. Arguably lower again given the coming recession and the market being flooded with the previous generation.
It will be interesting to see what AMD do as they could make life very difficult for nVidia.
And "by a lot slower" you mean "they're all faster than previous generation flagship 3090".
So while the graphics card formerly known as RTX 4080 12GB might perform about the same as the RTX 3090, it's no better value.
The issue isn't the pricing, even though that's an issue.
The issue is what looks like an intentional attempt to confuse consumers by selling two products with roughly the same name, but one of them has 25% greater performance. Some consumers may think "I'm coming from a 6GB card, 12GB is plenty, I don't need to pay more for the 16GB one, I'll get almost the same performance" without knowing the technical details.
Ideally they'll still read/watch reviews and get the best product for their budget, but that doesn't excuse misleading names.
Are you talking about last gen? AFAIK you can’t actually buy the 4080 12gb yet, right?
So you'd get the same price, just newer chip, newer encoder and DLSS3 support and all that at lower MSRP than what 3090 cost when it was new and launched?
That sounds like same value to me... or even a slightly better deal.
(prices made up, I have no idea how much TVs cost right now)
At any rate, $900 is too much! Of course different buyers have different budgets and tolerance for rapidly increased pricing. Two years ago I increased my $220 budget for GPUs to $300. Maybe next year I'll go as high as $350.
There will be cards in that budget, they just won't be faster than the 1500$ card from last year.
I said the main issue was naming of products designed to confuse consumers, not my anecdotal preference for price point?
But additionally, we'll see if the market at large bears such price inflation.
The monetary value of a thing is definitionally how much money you can sell it for.
Inflation is driven by consumers having more money. This means that more can be charged for the same products and the consumers will begrudgingly pay. This means more will be charged.
This is why giving ~50% of US net-taxpayers free cash caused inflation to spike.
I paid $1,600 for an evans and Sutherland card with 32 MEGABYTES to run Softimage on NT 4 because I couldn’t afford an SGI in 1997
I just want you to know I love this comment
Except anyone with a brain saw through it and enough content generated, that trick simply wouldn't work anymore.
The 4080 16GB is around where a 70 series card tends to sit.
[0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_release... Ignore the dlss2 vs dlss3 numbers, just look at the base numbers since dlss3 numbers are interpolated framerates
Though I have to wonder, do we want bigger 40 gen dies? The 4090 already guzzles at 400w at full tilt, and gets ar least 200+ fps at pretty much all games except maybe cyberpunk, and can complete video editing workloads at twice the speed of the 3090.
Do we need an even bigger lovelace chip?
Also I was playing the Darktide beta, and at 4k I want about double the framerate I currently get on a 6800xt (FSR 1.0 and DLSS (according to friends and comments on reddit+discord) both look bad in it). We're moving past crossgen games at this point too (and UE5 seems very heavy), so for eg. 100+ fps or 4k something in range of ~50% faster than a 3090 would be nice.
Now mere mortals can play around with Stable Diffusion and other art-generation technologies, this is going to increase demand for these types of cards.
My 3080 is well capable of generating 512&768 images with a high step count in under a minute, and 500 odd steps (just for fun) in around 2 minutes (or even less with different samplers)
The interesting bit is when we get more VRAM (24-32GB) and can actually train the models with off the shelf hardware without breaking the bank.
https://www.techpowerup.com/299183/nvidia-ad103-and-ad104-ch...
4080 12GB was universally panned. The 40 series launch also got heat for price gouging, particularly the higher cost for the low end of the launch (4080 12GB). They had to raise the cost of the lower end of the 40 series though if they wanted to maintain the value of the 30 series cards and clear out the remaining inventory. They couldn't just release a true 4070 for a true 4070 price. While the name was obviously bad, it seems likely that they wanted to obscure the release of a 4070-quality chip for a 4080-price while attempting to sell off remaining 30 series. Pure speculation: maybe they were hoping a "cheaper 4080" would come across to the uninformed as Nvidia trying to lower the entry cost for 40 series rather than raising it through an expensive 4070.
Two potential reasons for the rollback come to mind: 1) higher than expected 4090 demand means they can wait to launch a 4070. 2) higher than expected heat for the thinly veiled 4070 price gouging made it worth it to wait on the release since it helps sell more 30 series cards by raising the entry price for a 40 series while getting better PR in the process.
Has anyone done analysis on this? My layman's assumption is that with the shortages and gouging/scalping over the past two years, an awful lot of people decided to tough it out on their 10-, 16-, and 20- series cards, and now the narrative is that the shortages are over (whether or not the actual prices really back that up) and those people who skipped a generation or two are now emotionally and financially prepared to "treat" themselves to the new top of the line.
If this is it, though, it seems weird that it could really have caught Nvidia by surprise. Don't they have driver-level telemetry that would show them all those older cards plugged into new-chipset motherboards, and could give them some indication of demand?
Considering the worries about heating in the winter this year in some European countries, marketing the 4xxx as a secondary heater might actually be a good idea ...
I was shocked to learn today that B650 boards are available. That information didn't seem to make it anywhere near my usual technology news channels!
But... they start at $170 for a barebones motherboard. Having spent $200 not too long ago for a well-rounded mid-range X570 board, I find $170 for the starting line up quite steep. And it's unlikely builders want to pair their $300+ Zen 4 chips with the most basic board available.
The barebones right now would be $170 + $300 + $90 (16GB DDR5) = $560 before accounting for the rest of the parts (like a GPU).
Just wait a few months, pioneers are the ones that get the arrows (high prices) in the back side.
In EU, where the price and electricity prices are much higher, it appears to not sell out like it did in EU. (As far as I know).
It was the 4080 12gb I was expecting to flop hard. 4080 12gb was way too close to the 3080 going for jack squat so there was hardly a market for it.
In previous generations when they've had differing memory sizes for the same card, that was the ONLY change. So, it was useful for something like CUDA, but usually not for gaming. A specific audience.
For the 4080, the 12GB version has the following changes:
* 12GB VRAM vs. 16GB VRAM (the obvious one from the name)
* 7,680 CUDA cores vs. 9,728 CUDA cores for the 16 GB.
* 192-bit memory bus vs. 256-bit memory bus (understandable, since this scales with memory size... but also probably means the memory itself is slower).
This isn't just a different amount of memory, it is fundamentally a different product and should be marketed as such. Instead it's Nvidia being greedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
Looks like there's also a 5GB version which has slower clocks... which is about 10% worse... but I assume that's mainly due to clock rate, not the memory or the actual silicon.
Those all have the same amount of CUDA cores and processing pipeline, though. Unlike this '4080 12GB'.
See: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/GeForce-GTX-1060-...
In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.
Not even good for that, even just reading the slow VRAM slows down the entire GPU, so you never want to use the last 512MiB.
I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day.
It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks.
And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?
The last 512MB bit was mentioned nowhere in benchmarks or marketing material, until people realised something was wrong and nvidia said "teehee woopsies"
Sure, the numbers in benchmarks do drop off, but what was the actual effect when you ran an actual game on it? I never had to "avoid" anything and haven't really seen any notes about doing that outside the benchmark readers.
At the time you would have been much better off going for a 780 as they had some bargains - especially on the more rare 780 with lots of ram
I will never upgrade!
This "reverse" has nothing to do with yields, nVidia (rightfully) realized it's better to avoid a shitstorm because this 4080 12GB version is ~30% slower than the "real" 4080.
(Think of it like Intel calling the 14th gen i5 "an i9". Or heck, Exor deciding to label a Fiat sports car "a Ferrari 812 V4" while keeping the real thing "a Ferrari 812 GTS").
And of course, that's an gigantic dick move because it costs NVidia nothing to announce this, but probably means no one will even be able to make a profit on the 4080 12GB cards they already made (which a cynic might say was precisely NVIDIA's goal here, as plausibly deniable punishment dished out to the remaining ABIs for daring to let one of their own disobey the corporate overlord).
If EVGA hadn't already broken their partnership, this definitely would have make them do so. "Thank you for jumping through our hoops, after paying for the entire course yourself, now make a new course because you displeased your master" is not a great way to treat your partners.
Just forget the formerly named "12 GB 4080", it doesn't exist for now.
They will probably see what AMD does and then rebrand them maybe with some under or over volting tweaks.
This sounds horrific for the card manufacturers who have made a ton of product and are now unable to sell.
I doubt any partners had designs finalized, given the rumors of how little time they are given to do that before each launch (which is a problem in its own right, and one of the things they are know to complain about).
- source components - finalize packaging design - finalize cooling design - assemble - ship
Graphics cards in 47 days? I'd expect at MINIMUM 90 days.
AIBs need to design assets, decide what components they are going to use, design cooling, test that, sign contracts to make said cards, test the cards that have been made, and then ship them to customers.
You truly believe that every AIB knew "near nothing" about what they were building until public release? And then miraculously do all of that in a compressed time window? Source?
If people don’t want to pay inflated prices they should just not, and ultimately the problem should solve itself.
(even Zotac and EVGA tossed another $20-40 on the MSRP and those specific models were unobtanium for almost a year.)
https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/comment/?q=msrp&subre...
https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/comment/?q=msrp+1080&...
$725-750 was considered a good deal for an aftermarket 1080 at launch, if you could even find one. Sometimes they went up to $800 or higher from scalping/demand.
If we take that $700 figure in June 2016... the launch price of a GTX 1080 is equivalent to $862 today. And those prices go even higher ($985) with launch scalping.
As a meta-commentary... it's funny how people shift back and forth between the numbers that support their case, like at the time people were super mad about this whole fake-MSRP business, and now Pascal MSRPs are cited unironically as comparisons for the current stuff... but you couldn't actually go buy anything for MSRP for Pascal for at least six months.
I knew someone on another forum who was so upset about the whole thing that they called it the "holodomor launch"... cause being forced to use a GTX 970 instead of a GTX 1080 is just like when millions of people starve to death. People have buried the memory but the enthusiast segment was not happy about the Pascal launch either, at all, but today it's held up as a model launch with model pricing.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-has-been-sneaking-in-sl...
These card makers now have to sit on inventory and reprint boxes and repackage everything?
In the long run this is a good move considering how idiotic it is to give the same name to products with different dies and a ~30% performance difference.
At the very least there's probably some recall operations to ship back, take off the shrouds and put on new shrouds for the rebadge, if not also rebox.
edit: Also, have you ever taken a video card apart and re-assembled it? Even if the components/shroud are reusable for other 3080 (and likely are) this is a lot of labor cost above and beyond any practical waste.
Whats the story about Microsoft and Sony?
https://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/why-nvidias-chips-are-de...
RoHS solder failing was an endemic problem from that era and affected all products from all brands... for example, there used to be lots of reddit posts about people baking their Radeon 7850 GPUs too.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+7850+7950+baked+oven++si...
Apple is just an 800 pound gorilla in every relationship they enter, and they like it that way, and they can use it to try and recover unexpected costs. A lawsuit of opportunity - there would have been no point in anyone suing the near-bankrupt AMD at that point, but NVIDIA had money and it was worth trying to pump them for cash even if it was an industry-wide problem... NVIDIA is part of the industry, right?
If it is a simple rename, they can just prefix a new sticky label on top of the "4080 12gb" with "4070" for an example.
It's a mess but no need to make it out to be worse than it is, GN already confirmed that NVIDIA is compensating partners etc.
History... the GTX 1070 was a pinch better than the previous generation GTX 980 Ti; cost ~$429 (MSRP $379). The GTX 1080 was maybe 20-25% faster still, ~$699 (MSRP $599).
The RTX 2080 was launched as the top card (September 2018), with the Ti and Super coming later.
It wasn't until last generation (September 2020) where Nvidia introduced the x090 naming, and with an eye-watering $1499 price. The initial 10GB RTX 3080 had an MSRP of $699.
There is, because in certain parts of the world NVidia refuses to sell their founders editions, so AIB cards' all you can get.
The RTX "4080 12GB" and "4080 16GB" were much further apart in cores (IIRC a 30% difference) and so naming them in the same category in a way that suggests the RAM is the primary difference, was widely seen as disingenuous.
Yes technically any consumer could lookup the specs, but that doesn't still make it a dirty and dishonest move.
Jensen mentioned this with the Q2 earning statements [1][2], that pricing would be set to sell old (30 series) inventory:
> And so our first strategy is to reduce sell-in in the next couple of quarters to correct channel inventory. We've also instituted programs to price-position our current products to prepare for next-generation products.
> ... we've implemented programs with our partners to price-position the products in the channel in preparation for our next generation.
1. See JayzTwoCents video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15FX4pez1dw
2. Q2 Transcript: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2022/08/24/nv...
1080 $700 2016
2080 $800 2018
3080 $800 2020
4080 $1200 2022
10 series - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-1080/
20 series - https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/10-years-in-the-making-nv...
30 series - https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-delivers-greatest-... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series
40 series - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-serie...
The blog post reads like an Intern who is/was a Redditor wrote it. The "GPU buckled into a seatbelt" is an old-but-common PC Builder Meme/Tradition online (particularly Reddit).
https://www.google.com/search?q=gpu+seatbelt&tbm=isch
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/4skdlg
Thing is, they know there's plenty of suckers out there and will absolutely not call, not to mention price, it as 4060 which it clearly is.
Help us, Lisa, you're our only hope. Not that AMD didn't overprice the AM5 platform, too. The only way is to resist. Just wait it out if you can help it
The B chipset is cheap, and AMD mentioned the possibility of $100 boards.
Some boards in the market are actually <$150, yet most motherboard vendors went with outrageous price labels (!), even above $300. I doubt they're "twice as good" as the $150 boards. Prices should become more reasonable as time passes.
Hope you're right, thought. I would be interested in a 150 euro mini-itx board hosting one of the upcoming desktop APUs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7TRFK3lCOQ
1.4 million views in three weeks. And that is just a single Youtuber. Imagine all of them combined.
Tons of reviews saying $900 for the 4080 12GB is insane. The 4080 12GB is after all a 3060 update with 192 bit wide memory interface. Even the 3060 Ti has a 256 bit wide memory interface.
Definitely had me decide to wait to see how AMD does in Nov.
Much like the general news of AMD server chips, tons of press on Intel's shrinking Xeon marketshare. Sure people are talking about Intel, as a lesson on what not to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
It’s cutting edge technology for sure.
And faster blender renders
[1] It is increasingly obvious NVIDIA only views them as sycophants.
Was under the impression that perhaps they had changed direction late in the game and had to offload those other cards.. Or maybe they lacked the political will to "unlaunch" it earlier.
Did the poster have a gun to his head or something?
“Okay, okay, I’ve unlaunched the 12gb put the gun down, Linus.”
If it the cache hit rate is similar to Navi2 of similar size. It would have effective bandwidth similar to 3090 in 1440p and way above any previous gen card in 1080p but at 4k it would be around 3070 ti territory in terms of memory bandwidth. So a great 1440p card natively and to those who are willing to use DLSS to upsample from that to higher resolutions.
Sure they worked on the caches to improve performance, but I always worries that some games will do poorly with the caches and have terrible performance. After all it's the lowest frame rates that are most noticeable, not the max or average.
Charging $900 for a RTX 3060 memory width is insane.
So hopefully this is a sign that they're going to adjust the pricing of the 16GB 4080 to the price announced for the 12GB former-4080.
I doubt it, but one can hope.
What I bet will happen is: 4080 16G is going to be a very fast card that's going to sell as hot cakes at set price point. Just like the 4090 is selling very well despite all the moaning about power and price.
The tech still seems good (e.g. DLSS) but corporate decision making seems in freefall
This is the era of the $1000 phone and the $100 laptop. Running a decent metaverse needs something comparable to an NVidia 1060 6GB from 2016. That cost about $250 back then, and it still costs about $250 used. NVidia has nothing in their current product line at that price point.[1] This is a big problem. There ought to be something with NVidia 1060 graphics power and memory around $100. But no. NVidia got spoiled selling to the Etherium mining business at a huge markup.
The Metaverse may have to wait until the new generation of Chinese GPUs ships.
[1] https://www.gpucheck.com/gpu-benchmark-graphics-card-compari...
NVidia: Hold my beer.
Just call it the RTX L6000.
Maybe the think L is for Losers?
The 4070 was supposed to be the cash grab card for when everything sold out and desperate people would be willing to pay for it
I get that Engineers tend to be more practical in their names, and don't have the finesse that marketing is looking for. But at least some sanity checks would be good....
This is not looking through it with rose tinted glasses and nostalgia. It was objectively better, fun, straightforward and iconic. Not a single person knows what Intel's (or AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc.)'s advertisements after 2000's. Do you remember the last Apple ad? No. It is all generic, designer bullshit.
All of it has gone to toilet. Marketing people have lost it across the board.
Intel's i7 line-up goes from 2 to 16 cores, 1-4GHz, spanning 13 generations. Toss in i3/i5/i7/i9, and lines like Atom and Xeon.
Each time I need to upgrade my computer, I groan. It's not just less fun, it's positively miserable.
Most people I know either buy the cheapest possible computer, or an Apple. I don't know why Intel thinks anyone will spend extra if they have no idea what they're buying. Most non-Apple users I know have phones with faster processor, higher-resolution displays, and for higher prices than their laptops.
(I'm now actually looking at an AMD 7700 rig, because intel won't do ECC on "desktop" CPUs, except for a rare chipset that I can't find a mobo for sale at the moment...)
For Intel, it just results in most buyers buying the cheapest possible system since there is no way to tell what's what. Intel would make a lot more selling $400 CPUs than $50 CPUs, but to do that, people would need to see the value.
Yes, and dear God am I sick of it. AFAICT, they've bought all advertising space on the web, mobile, and TV for me, at the moment. (It's the one of the iPhone auto-dialing 911 in a wreck.)
I'm (still) not buying an iPhone.
Which was… 2007.
It's not the marketing teams to blame.
Marketing teams name things iPod, or MacBook, or PlayDate.
I don't know who names things at Intel, or Nvidia, or Sony, but it's not the marketing team. At least not a good one.
The One/Series S/X crap is genuinely baffling, totally incomprehensible unless you've really been keeping up with every Xbox release. You can go on Wikipedia and figure it out in a few minutes, but...you should not have to do that.
"PSOne" was a weird way to brand a slim console, but it's still obvious that it's a PS1. And while Sony did originally use PSX to refer to the PS1, that was an internal codename, i.e. "different from the Nintendo PlayStation[0]". The gaming press ran with it because people in that era insisted on awkward three-letter acronyms for all games consoles. Reusing it for a weird PS2 DVR combo unit is still way better than Microsoft launching two different consoles with the same name.
[0] The cancelled SNES variant with the also-cancelled Super CD add-on built-in, both built by Sony.
The letter is just tier.
It's remarkable how thoroughly they managed to outdo the confusing nature of "One". Who would look at "Xbox Series" and think that's the name of a specific generation? It's an artistic masterpiece.
Overall Nvidia generally has a very good naming system. They are easy to understand if you look at them for more than a minute. Nvidia is 4090? 40 = Generation. 90 = Model. Higher model # is better. They've stuck with the general concept for the better part of 20 years.
Intel's naming is decent. Their cutsey names like Sandy Bridge, meh. No one can never remember those. But the Core numbering system is solid. i3 is lowest. i9 is highest. The processor numbers after that can be a little hard and do require a bit of a decorder matrix to understand. But as long as it's a system, with rules, that they follow, and can be explained fairly easily - I'm ok with it. Heck they have a page that gives you the magic decoder ring: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...
It's now as much part of their brand as all other things are.
It's all pretty bad.
But I think the long and mysterious-at-first-glance model numbering is usually a good thing since it encodes a lot of useful information.
Sony’s problem is that they try to sell bad products for the price of expensive ones, and the best way to do that is to have incomprehensible names.
When I was looking in physical stores, at physical devices, I noticed that there were important differences between the [A-Z][8-9]0[A-Z]s, when I would research the model numbers online. 80 vs 90 indicated jumps in overall quality, depending on the other letters in the model name, which usually meant that the product was created specifically for the store (like Best Buy vs Costco vs buying direct), and would have other minor differences from the 'true' version.
A regular person would have probably just looked at the TVs in-store and decided based on whatever looked best, but I happened to have some specific features I wanted, and the weird-ass model names helped.
I really wanted a Panasonic Plasma but it looks like the sole importer may not be getting them anymore or might be getting less. But from what I understand the A90J and the top end Panasonics are the best in that they have a much better heatsink
It runs Android TV, which may or may not be a dealbreaker for you, but I enjoy it enough. I just wanted to be free of a vendor-specific TV os, in order to give myself more flexibility when I try to set up a pi-hole in the future. There's also a hardware switch to disable the TV's microphone.
Also, the sound comes out from the panel itself, and is (to me) great. It calibrates itself using the microphone within the remote, by having you hold it a certain way when performing setup.
Finally, there's an incredibly posh and satisfying 'click' noise when you turn it off. I don't know why, but this makes me like the TV more.
My TV lacks the ability to transmit audio via Bluetooth (no, I can't enable it, I think it actually lacks the module). Nobody could have told me that before I bought it, the marketing material and manuals all claim that it has it. There is precisely NO documentation for my specific model.
I'm starting to think that they're actively counting on people not completely testing their devices after getting them.
First, one could think that larger number means larger performance but this is not always the case. Second, one might think that "Ti" or "super" GPU is better than a regular one in every aspect but this is not the case also.
The same is about Intel. The best naming scheme is where numbers reflect performance or core count or cache size so that they can easily be compared by a consumer.
PlayDate - is that a video conferencing product?
These are not good product names
If I ask you about a Mustang, what do you think about first? Are you into cars and it's a Ford Mustang? Are you into Horses? Are you into Planes? Or maybe you're into ships? Heck, there is an entire list of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustang_(disambiguation)
A good name is memorable, not necessarily descriptive. Most product and company names today are made up anyways. Or they are named after something else in a completely arbitrary fashion.
The problem comes when a company establishes a name for one thing, then uses it for another. The iPhone is a good name in concept. Pro/Max/Ultra/Mini not withstanding. But what if tomorrow Apple said there was an iPhone Super Ultra Max that was 10" and couldn't make calls. People would argue that was an iPad and that this new Super Ultra Max was a stupid name.
4090 -> 2022 Nvidia Optium
4080 -> 2022 Nvidia Melium
4070 -> 2022 Nvidia Bonum
4060 -> 2022 Nvidia Benem
(I barand-name-ified the latin words for best/better/good/okay).
And “Bonum”… are you sure?
Bonum -- apparently that's the latin word for good? I dunno I just dropped words into google translate and then hacked off letters at random to fit the pattern. I'm sure they can come up with better fake words.
Choosing obscure names that make it extremely hard to compare characteristics within products by a company, much less to compare to outside competitors, is not a bug --- it's a feature.
Try buying a bike and figuring out how to compare it to other bikes by the same manufacturer from this year or last, or try to figure out what features it carries. You're left doing what you always do: staring at 7 tabs with spec sheets and slowly trying to absorb the features of the various "poorly" named offerings
It's anti consumer and I'm surprised there's not more outrage, given that a market purportedly should consist of rational consumers making informed decisions.
And that misconception of humans by economists has had massive repercussions.
No human is rational.
We are emotion machines riding hormone waves. Fatigue, hunger, anger, arousal all affect our choices and can be gamed.
It turns out, a CUDA core is not actually a "core."
Ultimately it's a count of the number of SIMD lanes.
I thought they could've just used the codenames, or whatever is actually written on the GPU IC itself...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
...but then you realise they called the "12GB 4080" an AD104-400, and the "16GB 4080" an AD103-300, while the 4090 got named the AD102-300.