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  • baka_toroi - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Damn this post-modern world where nothing has meaning anymore.
  • Alexvrb - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    What I don't understand is why the RX 560 variants and 1050 variants don't get some extra designation... such as 560SE or 1050+. Something, anything.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    All that is required is that they change the (insert British colloquialism here) number. GTX 1050, GTX 1055, GTX 1057.

    THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT.
  • Dragonstongue - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    LMFAO it must be difficult for Ngreedia and AMD to do exactly this, instead they rebrand the same GPU using the same damn name that uses a "leaner" design, so some poor fool goes in and buys what they think should be as fast as their buddies is, just to find out it never will be.

    there are SO many numbers they can use in any given generation, as well as naming, you mentioned some.

    for Nvidia they already have 1050, 1050Ti, if it "happens" to be slower then 1050Ti but faster than 1050, call it Geforce 1050 SE or 1051 SOMETHING ELSE, we buy them, it is what keeps their business alive, I guess they want to confuse people as much as they possibly can

    AIB are no better more often than not where they can EASILY give a "new" name to the "same card" so even online e-trailers do not fk up describing it, cannot tell you how many times the about to mention RX 560 14CU was not advertised as having only 14CU and only by going to the GPU makers website can you "sometimes" find this information which should be very visible.

    For Radeon, hmm Radeon 560 or Radeon 560 that uses 2 less shader cluster yet the one with 2 less (14CU instead of 16CU) often enough ends up costing MORE not LESS....talk about a slap to customers face.

    They absolutely should stop being putzes and do a better naming style...1050-1051/52/53-1050Ti....Radeon RX 560 (16CU) RX 559 (like 560 but 14CU) at least at a GLANCE you should be able to tell what is actually better and not worse.

    like a run of the mill corvette vs the high performance model (same damn name, but they are "smart enough" to call it C7..C7 LT1..C7 Z05..C7 Z06..C7 R (the paint jobs would be akin to an Asus ROG variant or MSI Gaming X, but the underlying "car" is of course the base C7 or the extra C7 R type thing.
  • Samus - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    Couldn't agree more! I've long stood by the facts of series numbering that ALL of these fucking companies seemingly ignore the latter digits in their models for no apparent reason whatsoever.

    Oh wait, confuse the customer. Got it, that's what I forgot about. Silly me.
  • edzieba - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    They do: the extra designation is "3GB".

    You could slap a few random characters after it "XT" or "BG" or whatever, but why use a random meaningless string when you can use something that also happens to tell you another part of the spec?

    For those familiar with GPUs they will be looking at benchmarks before buying anyway. For those unfamiliar, adding some random characters tells them no more about the GPU than adding the memory capacity as a suffix.
  • Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    The 3GB designation does not inherently tell anyone anything about performance. Even an educated customer would be justified to assume the 3 GB version was, in other respects the same as the larger RAM versions.
    It reads as "This is a 1050 with 3 gigabytes of RAM", not "this is a different thing with different performance" This should be called a 1050 MX.
  • edzieba - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    "MX" does not tell anyone anything inherent about the performance either.
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    Hence why people suggested a "1055" or the like. An differentiation by suffixes has been around since the start (Geforce 2 "MX/Ultra/GTS/Ti/Pro"), differentiation based on RAM size being different chip configurations is still rather limited and not as ingrained into consumer minds.
  • philehidiot - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    If "MX" as a differentiation method doesn't tell you anything about performance being different, by the same logic neither does "1050" or "1080". In my head, the model number tells you the GPU performance and spec and the memory capacity tells you just that. If you bought an iPhone 8 with 64GB of memory, you'd expect that the phone spec would be the same as another iPhone 8 with 128GB and just the memory is the differentiator. The idea of a model name is to tell you what spec you're getting and it's damned underhand to alter that spec by changing it along with the RAM. It means that if you want to compare models you can't just do it easily on the shop floor in your head, you have to research and generate a table and look at ridiculous numbers of benchmarks. They will differentiate performance with "Ti" when it's higher but not with anything else when lower. Mad.
  • Samus - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    The memory capacity shouldn't be used to designate a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GPU.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    To be fair, the first thing after "Geforce is good" that the average target buyer of this knows is that "more GBs is better". So 2 - 3 - 4 GB for the cards works out as indicator for their performance. And 10% more or less performance doesn't matter for these cards, because they're all slow anyway and require serious compromises inimage quality. So yes, the amount of memory may be the single most important spec after the "GTX 1050".
  • kpb321 - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    It's interesting that this changes the compute to memory bandwidth ratio and presumably the ROPS. That should mean this should handle higher complexity things that are compute bound better but do even worse at higher resolutions where memory bandwidth and ROPS become more important. The computer side of things should have been ~25% higher on the new card due to the increased number of shaders and slight overclock. NVIDIA claiming a ~10% improvement on average clearly indicates there are some cases where the new card will be memory/rop bottle-necked compared to the 1050 2gb and will not see much benefit or even potentially small losses in performance. It shouldn't be major losses in performance otherwise they wouldn't be able to get a 10% average with a max theoretical boost of 25%.

    On a separate note I HATE crap like this where the 1050 2GB and 1050 3gb have other differences than just the amount of memory. I hated it on the 1060. I hated it on the 560. Just add some random letters to it so that it immediately makes people wonder what's different. Call it the 1050 Se or 1050 BFC or 1050 WTF or what ever just give more indication that there is something else different besides the amount of memory.
  • bji - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    I guess I don't get the complaint. Let's say the card only had an additional 1 GB of memory and no other differences. Would you know implicitly how much faster it should then be in a given game or in a given benchmark? Maybe if you are a benchmark junkie you might be able to estimate it, but most people wouldn't, and almost no one would be able to say without testing exactly what the effect would be in a given game because of the emergent effects of having an extra 1 GB of memory to use.

    So for most users in most situations, there would be no clear 'expected' speed increase from the extra 1 GB. A user who understands how card speeds are measured and pays attention to benchmarking sites will find the benchmarking details for this card just as readily available whether there were architectural changes within the card or not. A user who does not understands benchmarking or how to estimate the value of a card, well, I don't know how they would understand the difference between a 2 GB card and a 3 GB card, except to expect that the 3 GB card would be "better", which this one clearly is.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "I guess I don't get the complaint."

    Different products should be sold under different names.
  • bji - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    I believe they are. One is called "GTX 1050" and the other is called "GTX 1050 3 GB".

    $ [ "GTX 1050" = "GTX 1050 3 GB" ] || echo "They are different products, Oxford Guy"
    They are different products, Oxford Guy
    $
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    It's a very poor naming scheme that sows confusion.

    The number should be changed. Each card design should have its own number. It's clear that if the product is in the 1050 series it will be 1050-something.

    There is no need to confuse people with RAM trickery. And yet, this is an old marketing tactic — like putting large amounts of RAM on cards that can't utilize it, running the RAM slower, having less RAM bandwidth due to a smaller bus, having lower clocks, having more disabled parts, etc.

    This fraud has a long history. Good luck making high-quality excuses for it because there aren't any.
  • bji - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    It has slight internal architectural differences that go along with having a different amount of memory. It will have slightly different performance, likely faster than the 2GB card on some workloads and slower on others. It has a different name to distinguish its performance profile from the 2 GB card. Consumers who care about the minor overall differences will be well informed by the reviews which will certainly be readily available once the card is launched. Consumers who don't understand the technical differences likely won't be able to tell the difference anyway.

    It's probably the case that NVidia doesn't want to further expand its product numbering schemes because this could cause more confusion for the uninformed consumer than anything else.

    I mean if you really think NVidia is trying to "trick" consumers into buying one $100 card over another ... think harder. Big companies don't operate on such a petty level.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "I mean if you really think NVidia is trying to "trick" consumers into buying one $100 card over another ... think harder. Big companies don't operate on such a petty level."

    Wow. I guess none of them have marketing departments.

    After all, instead of trying to trick people into buying from emotion instead of logic (the entire point of marketing), all big corporations do is release the specs and a simple, unemotional, press release.

    Call me when the shuttle lands.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "It's probably the case that NVidia doesn't want to further expand its product numbering schemes because this could cause more confusion for the uninformed consumer than anything else."

    Ridiculous. If Nvidia wanted clarity, it wouldn't use "3 GB" as a naming scheme. It would give each product a clear differentiation, like changing the number or sticking on a letter suffix.

    What's next? Labeling the product by ROP count?
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Example:

    1050
    1050 A
    1050 B
    1050 C
    1050 D

    Again, not difficult.
  • Alexvrb - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link

    SLIGHT? Look at the memory bandwidth! It's a completely different configuration.
  • bji - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    It has slight internal architectural differences that go along with having a different amount of memory. It will have slightly different performance, likely faster than the 2GB card on some workloads and slower on others (note that it has higher clocks which may offset other differences). It has a different name to distinguish its performance profile from the 2 GB card. Consumers who care about the minor overall differences will be well informed by the reviews which will certainly be readily available once the card is launched. Consumers who don't understand the technical differences likely won't be able to tell the difference anyway.

    It's probably the case that NVidia doesn't want to further expand its product numbering schemes because this could cause more confusion for the uninformed consumer than anything else.

    I mean if you really think NVidia is trying to "trick" consumers into buying one $100 card over another ... think harder. Big companies don't operate on such a petty level.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    They added the compute power to avoid the unbalanced memory controllers, which they were critisized a lot for in the past and which can give unconsistent performance (sudden massive performance drops as you fill up past 2/3 or 3/4 of the VRAM).

    You may argue in that case they should have just gone for a 4 GB GTX1050 - but then that one would probably have been too close in price to the Ti variant and not allow salvaging chips with one defective MCU, L2 or ROP partition.
  • LarsBars - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    With all of these different models and core configuration differences, gamers looking to buy an NVIDIA GPU won't know what they are getting anymore. I wish NVIDIA would make a big program about helping gamers know what they are getting.

    /s
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    How is giving each different product its own number a big program?

    GTX 1050, 1051, 1052, 1053, 1054, 1055, 1056, 1057, 1058, 1059, 1060.

    Again, not difficult. But, also — not deceptive.
  • Dragonstongue - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ exactly FFS, I thought these were multi-billion $ corporations that have hundreds if not thousands of VERY intelligent people behind them...apparently not LMAO
  • 29a - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    They do have different names 2G, 3G and 4G.
  • Alexvrb - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link

    Which designates the different amounts of memory, just like every other graphics card. It does NOT designate the completely different configuration. Most people outside of a handful of tech enthusiasts won't actually realize it's different other than the RAM.
  • Alistair - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Brilliant comment :)
  • IBM760XL - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    What a mess. More memory, but less memory bandwidth. Faster in computer-bound situations or ones that need more memory; slower in situations that rely on memory bandwidth. Yet the same name. So much for it being easy to know what you're buying.

    I've already cautioned a number of people about the 1060 differences in the 6 GB vs 3 GB models; so far all of those people have gone with the relatively straightforward RX 470 or RX 480 instead (yeah, the 1060 has been out awhile). Now the 1050 needs a similar disclaimer.

    Is there going to be a review for this one? I would be curious how it stacks up to the, err, GTX 1050.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "Yet the same name. So much for it being easy to know what you're buying."

    Both companies should have been sued years ago over this. It's fraud to sell differing products under the same name. Or, at the very minimum, the entirety of the enthusiast tech world should have publicly tarred and feathered them into submission to consumer-friendly marketing standards.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "It's fraud to sell differing products under the same name."

    That goes for the panel lottery practice as well. IPS and VA panels perform very differently and it's completely unacceptable for people to be forced to "roll the dice". Blind sales are beloved by corporations, since they are soulless, but they aren't very nice for actual people.
  • jimbo2779 - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    I agree like all bmw 3 series have the same engines or all sony bravias have the same internals or all silentnight miracoil mattresses have the same springs in them. I could go on for days about how the world of industry has things like this.

    If 1050 2gb is not distinguishable from 1050 3gb why would 1050 vs 1051 be any clearer? What is better in 1050 vs 1051? The number is higher in 1051 but it isn't a whole number so is it better or a revision of the same thing.

    I think you may be making a mountain out of a mole hill here my friend. Having a 2gb and 3gb is already very clear definition.
  • IBM760XL - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Despite my criticism of the naming, I will say that if the alternative was scrapping the silicon, bully for them for finding a way to make use of it. Not only does it save them a bit of money, but it's also good for the environment to not have to throw these away, and that's something I can support.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    "I will say that if the alternative was scrapping the silicon, bully for them for finding a way to make use of it"

    Fallacy. There is absolutely nothing preventing Nvidia from giving differing products differing names, whether it's a number change, the taking on of letter suffixes, or a combination of the two.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    And, no, "1050 3 GB" doesn't cut the mustard. It's too confusing.

    They could be doing 1050, 1051, 1052, 1053, etc.

    Or, they could be doing 1050, 1050 X, 1050 XE, 1050 XL, etc.

    Or, they could be doing a combination of the two.

    There is just no excuse for intentionally confusing customers about what they're buying. But, companies have shown that they like to do this if they think it's more profitable for them, as with panel lotteries. Magic: The Gathering is a poster child for the appeal to corporations for selling people the blind buying experience. People who buy into that product literally gamble, having no idea what they'll get in their pack or box. That's bad business.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Another example is the motherboard business, where boards will have five or six revisions, some of which have very different specs — like VRM capabilities. Instead of sticking on a letter or changing the number, they use a revision number in teeny-tiny print on the side of the box. It's deceptive marketing. I understand the desire to use the same box, due to pre-printing, but why is it so difficult to stick a prominent sticker on the box, at the very least — to change the name clearly?

    It's not.
  • bji - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    It's my understanding that the new product is specifically called "GTX 1050 3 GB" to differentiate it from "GTX 1050". It has different performance characteristics and a different name. Where is the confusion?
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    This article and the controversy surrounding this topic are purely imaginary.

    Thanks for letting us know. Meanwhile, in the real world...
  • bji - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    Well, this is definitely the age of drama. Everyone with any kind of complaint enjoys putting their complaint down in type and seeing it posted amongst similar complaints by all the other complainers of the world. Then there are those of us who are sick of drama and would rather look for rational explanations than insist that everything that everyone else does conform to our own personal perceptions of perfect clarity.
  • kpb321 - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Because it's not a clear and obvious name. Often times the amount of memory is included in the description of the card after the name even when the card doesn't come in multiple memory configurations. When the card is available in multiple memory configurations including the amount of memory is very common and in those cases it doesn't indicate any differences other than the amount of memory. Compare a 570 or 580 from AMD 4gb or 8gb only changes the amount of memory on the card nothing else. Look at past NVIDIA generations and that was generally true too. They could have just as easily called it the GTX 1050 T or 1050 Se or any number of other things to make it immediately obvious that this card isn't just a GTX 1050 with an extra GB of memory.
  • bji - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    In any and all cases benchmarking would have to be done to detect and quantify the actual performance differences. Different 'classes' of GPU only roughly fit into performance profiles (sometimes the gaps are wide, sometimes narrow, in performance between different parts even with different names such as 1080ti and Titan Xp), so when the performance between parts is likely very very close, the vendor may not feel it is in the consumer's interest to create a different name that would seem to identify a larger difference in performance than is actually present.

    Besides, most 3rd party vendors overclock and add all kinds of tweaks to the cards which means that without very explicit benchmarking, you can only be roughly certain of a given card's likely performance. So someone choosing between a 1050 and a 1050 3 GB really is in no different position than anyone else choosing a card by different vendors. Even the same vendor may use similar names for parts with differences in performance similar to the 1050/1050 3 GB (which is to say, small differences likely not noticeably by most consumers for most workloads).
  • 29a - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    I agree with you BJI, as far as I am concerned they have different names and I have no problems telling which is which. I'm not sure if these people are slow or just here to argue.
  • 29a - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link

    Oh and I forgot to add, finish the fucking Ryzen article.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    I'm going to blame mining for this thing existing. Nvidia and AMD have both said they're making and selling cards as fast as their supply chain will let them; salvaging this odd config - even if they don't have a whole lot of them - is one way to stretch part of it farther. And as noted it's far from the first screwball salvaged die model ever released; although weird low volume configs have more often been released as low end quadro or OEM only models vs something available at retail.
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    Marketing/PR at NVIDIA have it seems learned nothing from their recent meddlings with specs and branding. It won't stop until consumers cease buying the products and tech sites loudly call them out on such nonsense, ditto AMD when they do it.
  • 0siris - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    "With GPP, we asked our partners to brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear. The choice of GPU greatly defines a gaming platform. So, the GPU brand should be clearly transparent – no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon."
    -nvidia, less than three weeks ago

    "We hold everyone around us to standards we ourselves wipe our ass with regularly because we became too big for our boots and all we care about is money"
  • vvume - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link

    Designed for Netflix 4K? Regular 1050 couldn't run it because it only had 2GB of RAM (Netflix requires 3G oddly) and so 1050 Ti is the lowest card that PCs can run Netflix 4k.

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