What is up with video card naming?
I’m having trouble getting Skyrim to run well on my work laptop, which by all accounts should run the game just fine. In researching what I can do to fix the problem, I just read that Skyrim requires “GeForce GTX 550 Ti or GeForce GTX 260, or above,” which means nothing to me because the numbers don’t consistently count up and I have no idea how “GTX” fits into the general scheme of things.
It’s like saying that the fruit required for a good fruit salad is “nectarine and up.” Am I supposed to hold a stack ranking of all possible fruits in my head? “Oh, of course, so that means no grapefruit or banana…” No wonder people just give up and buy a new computer when new games don’t run well anymore.
Is this an intentionally opaque industry practice, or simply because marketing departments like to name graphics cards like luxury cars? For instance, there’s such a thing as the Lexus ES 300, but I don’t know how it compares to other Lexus models, or other luxury cars, or really anything for that matter. At least non-luxury cars let you make a mental map of just a few key models and then put the year in front of it. That allows me to immediately compare the cars, provided I know the hierarchy of Corolla/Camry/the third one that is clearly more expensive.
Of course, this is why people can usually remember how Apple products stack up, because there are only a few and they’re updated roughly every year. So a 2012 Macbook Pro 17″ is better than a 2011 Macbook Pro 17″ (for example), or a Macbook Pro is better than an iBook, and that’s the entire product spectrum.
But graphics cards. What’s available right now? Let’s take a look a the Desktop GPU’s on the NVidia page: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus
Five pages of esoterically named products. Each of them has a really fancy marketing description, like “GeForce GTX 760 is a powerful, feature-rich graphics card stacked with advanced gaming technologies …” Well, great, but how the hell do I compare that with “Turbocharge your gaming experience with the GeForce GTX 750 Ti. It’s powered by first-generation NVIDIA® Maxwell™ architecture…”
I don’t know how to choose these, except to pick a price and then read reviews and rankings based on price range… which is exactly how to choose a car in most cases. I want $30k worth of car, what’s the best I can do? It needs to seat four people and have reasonable trunk space, and also I would like to minimize the chance of it exploding in an accident. Hit up Consumer Reports, make a judgement call, etc. If that’s the process for video cards (replace Consumer Reports with Tom’s Hardware or something similar), then there’s no point to the names or descriptions of any of the cards. All that matters is how much it costs and whether or not it’s going to crash or explode.
What I’m really saying is, I wish graphics cards were named like cars and then updated every year. What if there were just NVidia Fusion, Dynamo, and Vertigo (in ascending order of price), and then a luxury brand with three more models? Then, just add the year to the name, and suddenly I have context to make a better decision! Wouldn’t it be easier to figure this all out?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go spend an hour trying to get my NVidia NVS 4200M to run Skyrim…