Software is versioned in numerical order which is pretty intuitive. At a glance it's clear which versions are minor updates, and which are major.
Cars are versioned by year/model, which again makes it pretty clear to understand minor/major updates. Sometimes significant updates are introduced in a model year, but generally the core features remain the same and it could still be considered an upgrade to that model.
Without a clear and intuitive versioning scheme it can be confusing and time consuming to make sense of a product line. And that gets frustrating if it keeps changing.
>Cars are versioned by year/model, which again makes it pretty clear to understand minor/major updates. Sometimes significant updates are introduced in a model year, but generally the core features remain the same and it could still be considered an upgrade to that model.
Tesla managed to break this trend massively, which proves a problem for things like insurance. The feature set on (say) the January 2014 Model S is very different from the December 2014 Model S, even though they technically share the same "year".
> Without a clear and intuitive versioning scheme it can be confusing and time consuming to make sense of a product line. And that gets frustrating if it keeps changing.
This is a case of Nvidia working with that sentiment rather than against it.
They were roasted by review sites previously for co-mingling architectures in the same numbering generation. So this time, they didn't.
TU106 was far too big of a chip to die-harvest low enough for a true volume x60 budget part.
Add in all the non-graphics acceleration hardware that needed to be cut to hit price and... Nvidia didn't feel this could be called an RTX 20xx part.
The 16xx is awkward, but it's the least bad choice.
BMW went that way very recently. It wasn't that long ago that their model numbers were very much explicit. A 328i was a 3-series chassis with a 2.8 liter. The i and d stood for fuel-injected and diesel respectively.
Well it still makes sense to some extent. i and d still mean petrol and diesel, with e for hybrid joining the ranks lately. But in general x1x(say 116d or 114i) are entry level engines, x2x(320d) are mid-tier and x3x(430d) x4x(240i) are higher end, more powerful engines.
That was fine back in the day when there was a correlation between engine size and performance.
Since they started strapping turbochargers to everything down to 1.0l, the engine size comparison has become less important. If anything my 3.0l car is seen as a negative because of the higher fuel consumption.
The manufacturers are just trying to walk a fine line.
I agree that it's not totally obvious to new customers, but it's also no that hard: within a generation, the relative performance of the cards corresponds to the order of model numbers. "ti" cards are more powerful than non-"ti".
Between generations, the whole line moves up something like one level of performance, so an (X)70 should be compared against an (X-1)80 and so on.
It's not the simplest thing, but I think most people will do research once the first time they buy a GPU, and then you have your mental model from then on.
I don't like "it's just a number" schemes, because they look like transparent attempts to get you to buy something for no reason. What's the difference between 3G and 4G? Well, they changed the number. Does that mean anything? How would you know?
