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A Part Of my How to Choose a Graphic card guide


So why are Nvidia Graphic cards named as 7600GT , 8800GTS etc ? What is the meaning behind the names ?

Lets take an example

Nvidia GeForce 8800GT and Nvidia 9500GT

-->The first number that is 8 and 9 denote the series number of the card . That is 8800GT is an 8 series card 9500GT a 9 series card

-->The series denotes the time of the release that is 9 series cards were released after 8 series cards

-->The last 3 numbers denote the range of the card

1xx-2xx : very low end, ie embedded
3xx-5xx : low end or 'mainstream'
6xx : midrange
8xx : high end
9xx : higher end


So the 8800 GT is superior to a 9500GT even though 9500GT was released nearly 1.5 years after the 8800GT!

The last two digits are almost always 00, and if they're not it usually indicates the card has been revised somehow, sometimes to correct some sort of problem or to increase the spec a bit without changing much. This may or may not give a slight performance increase.

-->But what about the alphabets following like the GT in 8800GT ?

Ultra : highest performance, highest price, for high end only
GTX : very high performance, for high end only
GTS : good performance
GT : normal performance
GS : decent performance but cheaper than GT

There are rare occurrences when a card outperforms another which is supposedly better according to its model number, for example the 8800GTS 512 (not to be confused with the regular 8800GTS) kind of departs from the scheme and also outperforms the 8800GTX.

Each new series of GeForce cards improves upon the performance of the previous. So an 8600GT (midrange in 8th series) is close to the performance of a 7900GS (very high end in 7th series)

And an Nvidia 9600 Gt is equivalent of the 8800GT