That's not exactly true. They didn't skip the 300 series entirely; they were out in the last 7-8 months but they just weren't remarkable enough to make the news. They were primarily lower-end OEM e.g. GeForce 340GT and the 300M series e.g. GeForce 360M were on laptops. They were nothing special though.
I still think Nvidia (and ATI/AMD for that matter) need to rethink their numbering and naming schemes. The time of the "GeForce" and the "Radeon" are over.. They need to think up some new names.. The Fury! Or the Helios! Something, I'm sure their marketing departments can come up with stuff.
Yea, but the 3 series doesn't concern us. It wasn't a new generation of cards. They were just refreshes of the 2 series, with new branding etc, made only for sellers of entire systems.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=626377They were running late with their Fermi cards (4 series), and their partners like BFG were in trouble, so they basically released a refresh of the low end 2 series as series 3 to keep them afloat. I don't think these cards were available at retail, and were available only to companies that sell complete systems like Dell etc.
As for laptop cards, I don't consider them to correspond to the desktop series of cards in any way, at least as far as Nvidia is concerned. For example, my laptop has a GTX 220 or something, but that card is about as powerful as a 7800GTX. The architecture is also very different from the 200 series cards.
As far as gamers are concerned, the number "3" was skipped. The next generation went directly from 2 to 4.
As for why MysterD, it is for the reasons stated above. They were running late, and made a stupid OEM refresh for business reasons. I can't blame them entirely though.
Nah, I think they need to keep those names. For instance you know a Radeon is a video-game card and a FireGL is a workstation card for designers. If they change the names, it could lead to some confusion.
The real problem is how they number things. Both companies seem to keep resetting to a lower number every once in awhile.
The thing is that they shake up the numbers and stuff every once in a while, and it seems promising because they seem to start with a more organized form of branding. But then shit happens, and they start mixing names to make the same products more marketable.
For example, the GTX 250 I got for my brother is actually not the same architecture as the superior GTX 280, 275, 270, and the 260 cards.
While the GTX 250 is still an impressive performer, it isn't at the same price, nor does it have the same level of performance or features as the cards mentioned above. It is actually a refresh of the Geforce 9800GTX, which in turn, was a refresh of the GeForce 8800Ultra... which was a refresh of the 8800GTX!
So yea, sometimes these companies (well, mostly Nvidia) take top of the line cards, make them significantly more power and heat efficient, raise the clock speeds and sometimes add faster RAM and more video memory, and then re-brand them as mid range products in the latest series of cards.
The 8800GTX was so phenomenal, that with refinement, it stood tall with the cards from the following generation.
The 9xxxx series of cards were all refreshes, but the difference between them at the GTX 3 series was that the 9 series had a full lineup available at retail.
