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Wildly different video cards with exactly the same name
I'm not talking about different board partners here. Rather, have a look at this:
https://www.hardocp.com/news/2018/03/21/nvidia_has_been_sneaking_slower_mx150_variant_into_some_ultrabooks
There are at least two very different cards that Nvidia calls a GeForce MX150 for laptops. These aren't just slight differences, either: one is clocked more than 50% higher than the other. What does Nvidia say about that?
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-mx150/specifications
Nvidia says that the card will have GDDR5 memory and support recent APIs, and that's about it.
Nvidia has been doing this extensively with their low end GPUs for many years. AMD does it sometimes, too. But it means that when you get a low end GPU, especially in a laptop, sometimes the only thing that you know about it is which GPU vendor the card is from. That might be enough for rabid fanboys, but it's most certainly not enough if you were hoping to get good performance out of the card.
At minimum, this is a "buyer beware" situation. If you buy a laptop with a video card that doesn't give you exact specs, assume it can't do anything more demanding than displaying the desktop and video decoding. Which is a small step away from saying, assume that the discrete video card won't even power on and you'll be using the integrated GPU all of the time. The point of model names is supposed to be to tell you what you're getting, but it doesn't.
One would think that this would be the sort of thing that lawsuits are made of. Nvidia would surely defend it by saying, it meets all of the promised specifications, which mainly means that it has the correct sticker on the box. I don't like to call for new regulations, but is it really too much to require that products be labeled so that a customer who is willing to do a little research can find out what he's buying before making a purchase?
https://www.hardocp.com/news/2018/03/21/nvidia_has_been_sneaking_slower_mx150_variant_into_some_ultrabooks
There are at least two very different cards that Nvidia calls a GeForce MX150 for laptops. These aren't just slight differences, either: one is clocked more than 50% higher than the other. What does Nvidia say about that?
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-mx150/specifications
Nvidia says that the card will have GDDR5 memory and support recent APIs, and that's about it.
Nvidia has been doing this extensively with their low end GPUs for many years. AMD does it sometimes, too. But it means that when you get a low end GPU, especially in a laptop, sometimes the only thing that you know about it is which GPU vendor the card is from. That might be enough for rabid fanboys, but it's most certainly not enough if you were hoping to get good performance out of the card.
At minimum, this is a "buyer beware" situation. If you buy a laptop with a video card that doesn't give you exact specs, assume it can't do anything more demanding than displaying the desktop and video decoding. Which is a small step away from saying, assume that the discrete video card won't even power on and you'll be using the integrated GPU all of the time. The point of model names is supposed to be to tell you what you're getting, but it doesn't.
One would think that this would be the sort of thing that lawsuits are made of. Nvidia would surely defend it by saying, it meets all of the promised specifications, which mainly means that it has the correct sticker on the box. I don't like to call for new regulations, but is it really too much to require that products be labeled so that a customer who is willing to do a little research can find out what he's buying before making a purchase?
