For the longest time, both AMD and Nvidia have taken to rebranding their low-end cards in order to present something “new” at low cost. While rebranding has become the norm, Nvidia’s GT 930 may be setting a new standard when it comes to that. Set to launch in Q1 2016, the GeForce GT 930 will reportedly come in 3 widely different flavours spanning 3 generations over 6 years in total.
From what we know right now, the 930 will use either Fermi, Kepler or Maxwell based chips. These will also be paired with either GDDR5 or DDR3 VRAM, accessed over either a 64bit or 128bit interface, meaning a lot of variation in performance. Due to the different chips used, the features offered and power consumption characteristics will vary widely as well.
The oldest chip is the Fermi one, the GF108 released back in 2010 with 96 CUDA cores. Slightly newer is the Kepler-based GK208 which was released in 2013 and features 384 CUDA cores. Finally, there is the new chip which is the Maxwell-based GM108 featuring 384 CUDA cores, offering the most features and performance. With such great variation, it won’t be surprising if consumer end up being confused and won’t be sure which GT 930 they are getting till they start gaming.
They already have confusing offers in the market.
GT 630 : 2 Fermi models, 1 Kepler
GT 730 : 1 Fermi model, 2 Kepler
now
GT 930 : 1 Fermi model, 1 Kepler, 1 Maxwell
And of course the Maxwell will only get 64bit data bus and DDR3 making useless for 3D.
Nvidia is betting on people not knowing about hardware. They will ask “What should I buy?”, they will get a “Buy a GT 930 with a Kepler GPU that comes with GDDR5″ and at the store they will just remember to say ” They told me to buy a 930 something” ending up with the worst possible model.
Combining this to the GTX 970 story, you have a company that values it’s shareholders much much MUCH higher than it’s customers.
well said
ou and costumer support suck and their software well lets just say i had to get the 353.82 version of software so i can run my qnix at overclocked 100hz than updating my version without uninstalling the old one and shit like that that just makes you go crazy