Nvidia quietly intros first GeForce 300-series graphics card

Nvidia is the king of re-branding their GPU's. It's almost like they want to confuse the consumer. How is anyone (besides the tech savvy) supposed to keep up with all these incarnations of video cards.

Looks like Nvidia’s marketing team have been working harder than their engineers again

Seriously nV, thats with lame products like this? Why do they even bother going with such things? This thing is just a 210 with another sticker. But I guess there are still people out there that only look at numbers.

"ohhh, 310! must be awesome since its series-3."

Whatever, and there I got excited for nothing

Nvidia is really on the ropes. They are in some financial difficulty, AMD is just smoking them on the cards and even their chipset business is faultering.

It's amazing what a few years can do. Not that long ago AMD was taking the slings and arrows for aquiring ATI and here we are and the tables have certainly turned.

Oh God, no more rebrandings... Nvidia should be thankful that AMD is facing production shortages on their 5000 series.

This only adds up to consumer confusion. Also why there are performance improvements only on mid to high-end models? budget models performance is almost equal to the budget models of the previous generation.

Damn at least they could have stuck some pretty heatsink on it to make it look more appealing to novice users.

I can't wait to see this card branded as "4GB MEMORY GeForce Series 3", and people buying it, thinking they'll play games on it

It even worked on me a few times when I was younger - now I had it with nvidia and buy only ATI

I have seen fancier 6200 models than this. At least they could have stuck a flashy heatsink to impress the noobies.

How much they plan to sell this thing for, $20? For less than 100 bucks you can get a much much better card, so i guess these things would come as a prize on a kelloggs cereal box. Nvidia, what has happened to thou?

I don't see why anybody would bye this card. If I want weak card I would just stick with a onboard card. If I want to play games or work 3d, this card is no good too. Only people who watch the memory would bye this card, cause it has 512MB (of slow memory).

You'll be surprised to find that still many people don't afford a better card and go with a lower version like the card described.
I know one computer shop where they are still selling 7200GS like crazy!

Oh no, just wait. Truly you must underestimate the power of a single streaming processor from this point, though there isn't any FERMI conglomerates at this time, they've souped up the single CUDA core even more powerful than before in this architecture. This is true because look at the 5970, look at the frames it gets in comparison to it's streaming processor count. At one benchmark it received an average of 37 fps for crysis at very high settings given it's 3200 cores. The 295 GTX received 25 frames for 480 cores. The 25:480 ratio means the 200 series has a 0.052 frames per core ratio in comparison to ATI's 0.012. When FERMI does come out to consumer graphics acceleration, I bet that ratio, even in such a marginal increase, could mean completely outdoing anything ATI has to push out after such a grandeur release.

anyone else sense that Nvidia is in trouble? It's a sign of desperation when a company takes an old design and continually rebrands it with "new" marketing models. It's like Nvidia desperately wants to shout to the world that it has a "new" product but doesn't really have anything.

another rebranding. maan, NVIDIA needs to stop doing that. the current GT 210 is nothing more than the 8 series that gone through 9 series, gt 200, and now 300. teh compnay needs to find a way to chp the current real gtx 200 series and then make a budget versino out of it.

Heh... better get a mainboard with HD4200 graphics GPU onboard and you'll get more than this little piece of ... ehem, hardware from NVIDIA.

I dont want these little weaklings, I WANT MAH GTX3XX!!!

I dont think nVidia is in trouble, i just think they are out of touch somewhat with what consumers want. Maybe they need to fire and hire a new marketing department.

This has got to be some sort of joke.....and it IS funny. Just look at the picture.
Nvidia couldn't possibly be that stupid.......and aren't you even hungrier for a wicked new 300 series card that stomps the 5970?
I look for just that during the first half of 2010.

Nice try Zero,
the shader core architecture of Nvidia and ATI are not equivalent, and can not be compared as such, so your premise is incorrect. given the different structure of the two different GPU's the Nvidia is about 4.5/1. even after that calculation, shader cores are only one of the aspects to be taken into account.

For the price range you can buy a way better (older) one, even an amazing used (From those who are selling their nvidias to get the latest ati).

Lol, 7200GS new is probably priced about the same as a 7900GT used, so you have to be a bit of a ***** to buy that card and pretend you're a gamer. Being a gamer requires sacrifices... and if you can't do that, then you'd better start playing Solitaire.

This is joke. The GT 210 and 220 didn't hit retail until Sept/Oct and they're already renaming it?!? A year from now we'll probably see features in the display drivers that are only enabled for the 300 series and not the 200 series even though they're the same parts. Nvidia has done the same in the past.