X-bit labs

Contemporary Graphics Card Naming Guide

Category: Video

by Igor Kozachenko

[ 10/25/2005 | 04:00 PM ]

It is so easy to get confused with the names of all those numerous graphics cards the hardware vendors have introduced. This is when we decided to offer you some help. Our information guide will give you very clear idea of the major technical differences between the cards and will lead you through all the tricky names and markings that are currently circulating in the market.

Table of contents:

• ATI Graphics Solutions
  
• NVIDIA Graphics Solutions
  

Before you go to the information provided in tables below, you should take into account the following. A lot of data that we provide in these tables, aren’t official data. Both leading graphics chip developers have always been very scarce when it came to revealing the technical details about their graphics solutions. And the farther on, the fewer details were shared with us.

Of course, the reasons behind this are quite understandable: the more things are unclear about the actual potential and power of the solutions, the higher is the probability that the potential customer will go for a more expensive product and the easier it is to mislead the users with such “pseudo-advantages” as twice as much onboard graphics memory, high bus bandwidth rates, DX version X.X support, and simply higher numeric index in the product name (and we all know pretty well, that high numeric index doesn’t always stand for higher performance). Not to mention especial cynical cases when the manufacturers add various suffixes to their card names, so that the users get totally lost and confused.

So, we had to resort to a lot of alternative unofficial sources to get some of the data for this guide. Of course, we do not provide you with any unverified info, however, errare humanum est, so you have to keep in mind that the sources may sometimes be mistaken either. Please, if you come across any uncertainties or mistakes, as you think, do not hesitate to point those things out to us in the Comments section for this guide or e-mail us about it.