Nvidia's nearly new sale

It's playing the numbers game again. This time, it's Nvidia's turn to bring confusion to the computing world. In what the manufacturer has called "one of the largest generational leaps in company history", the launch of the GeForce 9600 GT sounds like it should be the next benchmark in performance, showcasing a new graphics processing architecture.

But it isn't.

The GeForce 9600 GT is actually a midrange card, which is no bad thing in itself. Bringing performance to the masses is very commendable. And there's nothing particularly wrong with launching a new GPU architecture into the middle of the market rather than the high end, either.

However, the GeForce 9600 GT isn't a new architecture. In fact, other than the price, I'm struggling to see why it should be the first GeForce 9. The new card uses a GPU called the G94, which is essentially half of the G92 launched in November 2007.

Where the G92 has 128 stream processors, the G94 has 64. Both operate at the same core and shaders clocks of 650MHz and 1,625MHz respectively, although the G94 has a slightly slower memory clock (1.8GHz versus 1.94GHz).

Déjà vu all over again

What makes this all so confusing is that when the G92 arrived, it wasn't the first incarnation of GeForce 9, it was another GeForce 8. Its launch was one of the most bizarre events in computing of 2007, which still makes me wonder if someone in Nvidia's marketing department either has a very dry sense of humour or a strange penchant for unusual forms of mushroom.

The company first launched a card called the GeForce 8800 GTS at the end of 2006 as the vanguard of the 8000 series. This was the 'affordable' version of the flagship GeForce 8800 GTX. A few months later, another version with half the memory arrived, and ended up being the really big seller.

But then Nvidia launched a product with the same GeForce 8800 GTS name again at the end of 2007. This time, however, it was using the newer G92 GPU rather than the G80 of the original version. Why Nvidia wanted to launch a significantly faster card with the same model name as its predecessor still remains a mystery.

Now, with the introduction of the GeForce 9600 GT, we have the GeForce 9 launched in a cut-down version of the chip inside the GeForce 8800 GTS. Okay, so car manufacturers often put an older engine in a supposedly new car design. But this is the first time I've seen a feature-reduced version of an existing chip marketed as the new latest and greatest in the computer market.

It is going to be a lot faster than its 8600 GT predecessor, just as the marketing alleges. After all, it has twice the number of stream processors. That is quite a leap forward. But in reality Nvidia should have launched the G92 update of the 8800 GTS as the first 9 series - because that is effectively what it is. Then things would have made sense and logic would have remained in the universe.

Maybe it should have been the 9800 GTS instead, although the various flavours of the 9800 name are now widely expected to be based around faster versions of the G92, and a dual-GPU configuration. These are due in the next month or so.

Nvidia has changed the internal GPU code names it uses as well, moving from the Gxx nomenclature to ones like D8P or D9E (which are G92 and, er, well, a faster version of the G92 respectively...). So maybe someone at Nvidia has just gotten confused about which chip is in which model name. I don't blame them. I certainly am.