2 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 6 gig 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 now you could say well Nvidia probably did that because they knew that no one was going to be excited about a relaunch of the same GPU from 2 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 2 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 30506 gig 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 ug green their nexo 20,000 Mah 130 W portable charger is packed to the brim with both power and capacity meaning your devices can stay powered on and connected for even longer so check it out at the link down in the description Kuda cor 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 3056 gig to the original 8 gig 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 you here the thing is budget GPU Shoppers are much less likely to read or watch a review before they click check out I know this from my experienc 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 380 and yet the 3050 got fewer views across the board for the media that covered both cars 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 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 350's name on an inferior product Nvidia has made it confusing on purpose they've created a situation where even a techsavvy 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 sponsor 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 in 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 360s 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 are high and instead they've done the opposite basically at every turn basically forever and this is a real problem with realworld consequences for the consumer I personally have been bamboozled once by Nvidia I bought an enforce 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 gtx660 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 it's 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 nine 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 powerups 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 470 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 and since as we're finishing this video they did it again and this time it's both better and worse a new RTX 470 just came out with a slightly slower and cheaper gddr6 memory instead of the gddr 6X the 470 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 card why do these alternate versions of cards exist now the obvious answer is Corporate greed and sometimes aam'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 dieses 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 all right 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 ug green sometimes having your devices plugged into the wall might not be the most convenient thing imagine you're at a conference with let's say 5,000 people attending there's no way your phone laptop and any 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