Nvidia are obviously going to start renaming all the 200 series cards with 300 series names to confuse the general public into buying the same card twice and believing they are going to get better performance
the only thing the 210 offered was DX10.1 not particulary worthy of a whole generation. Maybe its the bad press already associated with the 3xx cards??
or maybe nvidia didnt want to appear too far 'behind' ATi (ie 3xx compared to 5xxx). silly thing yes, but look at nvidias past naming schemes.
Woohoo! 480s for me! I don't understand why they're bothering to jump the '300' series gap though. I mean, in the case of other series, the equivalent 'x10/x20' is simply a rehash of the previous generation whilst the 'x60'+ is is the current generation. Maybe Nvidia are worried that people will think that all cards of the 300 series would be DX11 compatible, when this wouldn't be the case. Ah well, it's not like I ever understood Nvidia/Intel naming practices anyway
+1 No, there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason if you look it that way AT I: NVIDIA 9X00 series : 5X00 series X8X0 series : 6X00 series 19X0 series : 7X00 series 29X0 series : 8X00 series 38X0 series : 9X00 series 48X0 series : GTX 200 series 58X0 series : GTX 400 series both parties, pretty much have been sequential
Knowing the name stratagies of hardware companies it'll be somewhat like this with the next few genoration of card naming: 200 series 400 series 600 series 900 series 800 series 300 series Yup, makes sense to them!
well, they did burn off the 3 series by releasing Dx10.1 low-end hardware. so it makes sense to start a new series.
Why can't they just go up and up...i.e. 310, 320, 340, then when that range is done go to 4xx Who names these anyways...?
Nvidia marketing team: "Fermi is SOOO POWERFUL... it doesn't deserve the 300 series name, it should be in the 400's"
I guess they tried to avoid people calling it 10 000, as the last gen was 9000. I don't know.. it's marketing... Nothing goes over 9000 series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqMMDIRS4ZE
iirc they were purely OEM chips for budget pcs and laptops. EDIT: yup they are just rehashed 9000 series chips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_100_Series#OEM_GeForce_100
so they can sell old products with shiny new names? place your money on what the 8800GTS/9800GTX/GTS250 will be called next...
but surely they have to sell it at retail? so GT340 AND GT440 aswell. nvidia is like the obsessive compulsive who cant seem to throw anything away. they would probably sell the G80/G92 in ten years if they could get away with it.