nVidia's "new" GT 250 video cards

I'm not really sure exactly when the 250 series from nVidia was officially released, but I know it was fairly recently, like less than a week or two. Having heard no "pre-release hype", I was happily surprised to see these "new" cards on the market at such reasonable prices. But I started looking closely at the specs of these "new" 250 series cards, and noticed that many have the EXACT same specs as numerous cards from the 9800 series... :confused Yes, I thought it was strange.... "Why release a whole new series of video cards when they already exist?". Well, here's an article that pretty much explains it all:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/nvidia-geforce-gts-250/6660.html?doc=6660
As it turns out, nVidia is just renaming the 9800 series; they are now called the 250 series. Don't get me wrong, I love nVidia, I've been an nVidia guy even back when I was still running an ATI card (OK- it doesn't make sense, so what), but this seems a bit shady to me, and just pointless. The opening paragraph(s) of the article I linked to sums it up pretty well.

[dlb]

 

Dirty cheating Bas***ds, I actually owned a 9600GT & always wondered why it disn't seem much better than my 8600GT. It claimed on the box in very large print to be 90% better than the 8600GT :mad

I am staying ATI now I think, my 4870 1GB is way more impressive than any nVidia card iv'e ever had, I don't mean in tearms of comparison, I mean I get much more out of the card than I expected. With nVidia I have always remained underwhelmed with their performance.

:major2-Bit-Geek:major

 

Pardon coming in late here - I found this thread through: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=185263

I just want to add, don't blame just nVidia - name shuffling is simply Marketing 101 - like putting "New and Improved" on your favorite cookies - only to find out they are the exact same - at this point, you just have to hope the box does not cost more and contain fewer cookies.

Bottom line: Do your homework. Ask questions. Become intimately familiar with Google.

 

Well, the 250GTX outperforms my 9800GT at stock speeds and the card doesn't look to clock as well as the 9800GT and they have an extra cooler on their setup whereas I'm on stock air so the two cards are nearly the same in the real world. This revelation won't make me scrap my cards for ATI's. Thanks for the heads-up dlb

 

I have just changed from a Nvida GTX260 card to the new 295 and so far i am disappointed in the performance.
It is definitely faster than the 260 for gaming and the screen display is much sharper plus the colours are better.
My disappointment is that after all the hype about it being fastest thing on the planet i think they told a few lies.
You can overclock the 260 to run as fast but not give the definition on screen or you can buy a 285 which is a 280 factory clocked and is faster than the standard 295 (no doubt i can overclock it)
Without a doubt if i was upgrading from an 8600 or 9600 it is worth the bucks but at the high end of the Nvida cards it is not that impressive so i have a $400+ brick on my hands.
I may be a bit early with my criticism as i have only had it a couple of days but so far it has failed to impress.

 

Yeah - especially with new graphics cards, it is often necessary to wait until new drivers are released for the full potentials to be realized.