Ranking Nvidia's Shady VRAM SKUs - Die Shrink Telegrams

I think the second sku of the GT1030 that swapped GDDR5 for DDR4 is the most egregious Nvidia sin. As the GN review stated: The average consumer cannot reasonably be expected to look at “GT 1030 2GB OC LPD4” and understand that is 55% slower than “GT 1030 2GB OC LPG5.”

MarkCentral

I'm biased, but I'm going to vote for the 2060 12GB. It's currently rotting on retail shelves after being foisted on stores at the height of the shortage with prices higher than current 3060s. Since it's not a current product, there will be no back end rebates coming to help mitigate the loss. No one wanted to carry it, but no one was given a choice. Now we're all stuck with Nvidia's mining refuse. The 12GB 3080 definitely caused the most confusion though.

Durmij

How about the card that was too shady even for Nvidia - the "unlaunched" 4080 12GB (though that might have had more to do with the economic conditions at the time)

Chris Rijk

I think that while many got bamboozled by the 1060 3G, sadly the GT 1030 DDR4 is the worst offender of these, because it honestly is not just another tier, it's an entirely different world. Like we're not expecting to play much on those basic GPUs, mostly low end & esports, but to go from 1030 GDDR5 to 1030 DDR4, we're talking going from say 100 FPS in esports to 40 FPS with severe input lag. (Dawid does tech has done a number of these tests - even the GT 1010 GDDR5 will kick the pants of the 1030 DDR4... but sadly the 1010 also has a DDR4 cousin and the box labeling is poor on many of these just like the 1030)

Crast

If you want to go even further back, there was naming chaos-- back in the olden days of early 2000s, the Geforce 4 series of cards. The Ti4200 had both 64MB vs 128MB SKUs. It was even more confusing in that case because the 64MB model had slightly fast clocked RAM, so it would run better than the 128MB model so long as the textures loaded wasn't above 64MB total. Let's not even get to the whole Geforce 4 MX mess, which was basically a rebranded Geforce 2 card. If you were expecting DirectX 8.1 support or hardware pixel/vertex shaders that were standard on the normal Geforce 4 series, you were SOL

Woody Chang

Hi TND, I think its the 1030, in my opinion when its happening to a product thats sits so low in the product stack it makes the most difference becuase the performance loss will more often be the difference between a game being playable and not

Increasing consumer choice by providing more different GPUs at different price points is never anti-consumer when Nvidia does it!

Jen-Hsun Huang

All of 'em, but if I had to choose it would be the same two as Hobakas mentioned above. 3060 8Gb and 1030.

Earth Taurus

The 2 worse are the 3060 8Gb and the 1030 with DDR4 because they come out with the same name of an already launched product far more powerful !

HOBAKAS

Hi, I dont like RTX 3080 12GB with No MSRP, why? cos it fricking cost so much... yes GT 1030 was there but you dont pay kidneys for that or expect top tier perf. GTX 460 I dont have any own memory. 1060 3GB lacked 7% in gaming perf and cost 250euros vs 350euros so that was justified tradeoff. 3060 8GB came so late so it was day late and dollar short. Then again GT 700 series should burn in fire, 20$ gpu vs 50$ GT 1030 doesnt make any sense. Even GT 1030 doesnt cut it for desktop (2d) use in some scenarios. Why? ignorant people always buy cheapest coz they dont see difference and then some "IT guy" has to waste hours and hours patching up their stupid buy and smoothly try to explain they wasted money. Though what is and was devious for example 1060, you had no way to know as customer it is also perf hit, other than checking reviews. Same for 4080 12GB, 2080 and so on, using tier below or cutdown dies what name suggests.

Timo H