Two years ago, Graphics Giant NVIDIA caused a wave of outrage when they announced two
gaming GPUs that had the same name, but seriously different performance.
Thankfully, though, they learned their lesson from that response, and they never did it
again. Sorry. They did do it again.
They did it again less than a month later, and they're still doing it today.
The only difference, the only difference, is that they're keeping this behavior out
of the headlines by doing it on the budget GPUs that the media usually ignores.
For example, the RTX 3050 6Gig, did you even notice when this thing was released?
I don't blame you. Rather than creating a product guide and sending samples to reviewers for testing, NVIDIA announced
this thing by writing a short blog post about it like it was 2009.
As a result, very few reviews were made, and even fewer people watched them.
You could say NVIDIA probably did that because they knew that no one was going to be excited
about a relaunch of the same GPU from two years ago anyway, but I think they did it
that way because they didn't want anyone to notice that it is not the same GPU from
two years ago. How do they think that this is okay?
It isn't okay. And to show you just how not okay it is, we are finally going to be looking, not just
at the 3050 6Gig, but we're also going to be putting a spotlight on the many times in
the past that NVIDIA has pulled this dirty move, stretching all the way back to the
beginning. And we're also going to put a spotlight on our sponsor.
If CUDA cores and memory buses don't mean much to you, don't worry, because all you
really need to know is that when we compared the new 3050 6G to the original 8G model,
we found that in both real games and in benchmark apps, there was a big enough difference that
a more appropriate name for this new car would have been RTX 3040 or even 3030.
This calls into question, what even makes a 3050 a 3050 in the first place?
It clearly doesn't mean the specifications and it doesn't even mean the performance.
And what's really frustrating for me is that by drawing this comparison to the original
3050, it makes us think, oh, this is a really bad card, but it's not.
It's actually the best GPU on the market that doesn't need extra power cables.
So if I were, say, upgrading a Dell OptiPlex for some serious gaming business, it could
actually be a really great option. It just isn't an RTX 3050 option, and calling it that is misleading.
All NVIDIA had to do to avoid this video ever being made is give it an appropriate name.
Let's talk about why they didn't, and fair warning, you might not like what you hear.
The thing is, budget GPU shoppers are much less likely to read or watch a review before
they click checkout. I know this from my experience working retail, but even if you don't believe me, look at
the numbers. The original RTX 3050 got the full launch treatment from NVIDIA, and if we look at the Steam hardware
survey, we can see that that card sold extremely well, more than the high-end RTX 3080.
And yet, the 3050 got fewer views across the board for the media that covered both cards.
And that kind of makes sense. I mean, anybody would put the extra research into a $700 purchase, but wouldn't necessarily
on a couple hundred dollar purchase. So mainstream shoppers tend to rely more on salespeople at big box stores for help choosing
the right product. And if you've ever tried to do that, you know that having someone read the label on
the shelf to you is often the best you can hope for.
And I don't even blame those sales reps. They're paid to sell things, not to be experts on all of the stuff in their spare time, and
there's a lot of stuff that they're expected to sell. So I think that by reusing the RTX 3050's name on an inferior product, NVIDIA has made
it confusing on purpose. We've created a situation where even a tech-savvy sales rep that is trying could think that,
well, hey, as long as you don't need that extra memory, say to game at a higher resolution,
this version with less memory should perform the same and save you a buck.
And it gets even worse. Even for the folks who attempt to do their own research, by reusing the same name, NVIDIA
ends up confusing them too. Look at these results on YouTube.
Sponsored Junk. This is fine. This is also the right card.
Sponsored Junk. Wait. That's a video about the original 3050.
So I could search for the exact correct product name, pick the first highly viewed video I
see, and I could think the card I'm buying is, I don't know, basically that, but with
less memory. Now, if this was the first time it happened, I might say, oh, NVIDIA, you made it silly.
But as I've already said, this is part of a pattern of shady behavior.
Let's pivot to the RTX 3060 8 gig, which is another example that happened less than
a month after the 4080 12 gig scandal.
On first glance, this one doesn't seem that bad.
Then you notice that when they cut off a third of the memory, they also cut off a third of
the memory bus, which slows all of it down.
So in both games and benchmark apps, even ones that didn't need the extra video memory,
we measured a big performance difference. Now the saying goes that there's no such thing as a bad product, only a bad price.
So this one would have been more okay if NVIDIA had also provided a discount, except that
they didn't. The cut down RTX 3060 launched at the same MSRP as the full fat card.
Why? Well, because it was during the GPU shortage and NVIDIA thought they could get away with
it. Unfortunately for them and good for everyone else, the shortage was ending around this
time and regular RTX 3060s soon came back down to their normal pricing.
So thankfully there aren't that many of these manufactured e-waste cards out there.
Now to be clear, lots of other companies have misleading names for their products.
We just finished calling out NVIDIA's rival AMD for a similar behavior.
But as the leader in the market, I feel that NVIDIA has a responsibility to set a good
example, to put the bar high and instead they've done the opposite.
NVIDIA at every turn, basically forever. And this is a real problem with real world consequences for the consumer.
I personally have been bamboozled once by NVIDIA.
I bought an N-Force motherboard for my AMD CPU, this was back in the early 2000s.
And a big part of the reason was that it had GeForce 4 graphics.
Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that GeForce 4 MX is not in fact GeForce 4.
GeForce 4 MX was more like a GeForce 2 than a GeForce 4.
Now we're not going to have Labs actually benchmark a 20 year old motherboard to show
you the exact differences, because why would we when we can pick out more recent examples?
Let's look at the GTX 660 from 12 years ago.
This one was a mess, or rather these two are messes.
Both of those cards are called GTX 660, but under their coolers are completely different
chips. Plot twist. Their performance is not nearly as different this time, less than 10% in Tomb Raider 2013,
and we see the same in our benchmark apps. But here's the thing, if I expect 10 donuts and I get 9 donuts and a half eaten donut,
I'm still pretty ticked off. And depending on which GTX 660 you get, it could be even further off than that.
On tech power-ups list, we found a whopping four versions of this GPU, but then none
of them matched this card, which has more memory than any of them.
And it's hopeless to find a pattern in this. Sometimes NVIDIA seems to make an honest effort to match the performance between their dissimilar,
but same named cards. As we were writing this video, an early sample of an RTX 4070 with just 10 gigs of memory
was found, and in this case NVIDIA boosted other specs in order to make up for the lack
of memory, and they've done that sort of thing before.
As we're finishing this video, they did it again, and this time it's both better and
worse. A new RTX 4070 just came out with a slightly slower and cheaper GDDR6 memory instead of
the GDDR6X the 4070 is supposed to have.
Now that's about 95% as fast as the original, so to be fair it's not too far off, but what
makes it bad is that the cards aren't going to have a different label to let you know,
hey, you're buying a slower card.
Why do these alternate versions of cards exist?
Now the obvious answer is corporate greed, and sometimes Occam's Razer does hold true
here. But other times their product strategy is actually pretty reasonable, even if I don't
agree with the way they present it. The 660 chip change, for example, was done to salvage higher end dies that didn't make
the cut and otherwise would have been wasted, so they were cut down a bit more and turned
into a lower end product. Alright, no problem, but hey, if they were all reasonable and clearly labeled, we wouldn't
have had to make this video, and this is where things get ugly.
We've complained before about the way NVIDIA sells their laptop GPUs.
Not only do they use the same names as their desktop counterparts, even though the mobile
RTX 4090 is more like a 4080, but there's also the problems of them using much slower
memory and a performance limiter based on the cooling and power, a limiter that varies
from one laptop design to the next depending on the manufacturer.
As we've seen, this limiter can drop performance on these chips by an entire product tier,
all of which leaves us with the most important question of all.
If the name of the product doesn't mean anything about the GPU you're buying, including the
performance, then what the ever-loving bum does it mean?
As of 2024, it seems like it just means you pay us this much, and if you're not obsessed
with tech news, you'll get, well, whatever you get.
Oh hey, I got a message from our sponsor.
If you enjoyed this video, go check out the one we did recently about the confusing nature
of these names in the first place, something that the whole industry has been doing a really
bad job of because bigger numbers sell better even if it's not actually better.