Today, I’m focusing on nVidia’s practice of (mis)labeling their line of mobile graphics chips to make them seem more equivalent to their famed desktop products.

Earlier, I was reading Trusted Reviews’ excellent coverage of the first laptop to integrate a 8800m GTX. Having used many nVidia mobile and desktop graphics chips in the past, instinctively, the first thing that entered my mind was to what extent has nVidia limited this mobile chip’s performance compared to that of its desktop equivalent.

It seems that every time nVidia releases a new mobile chip, they lend it a title that closely matches a desktop product, which, if you ask me, implies that it also closely matches it in performance. As we all know, this is hardly the case. Over the years, lowered expectations for mobile graphics performance has been something we’ve all come to live with.

It’s obvious that nVidia is lending their new mobile flagship the ‘GTX’ title because it is the fastest laptop GPU that they’ve ever produced. But, when I read further and found that its specs line up almost exactly to the desktop 8800 GTS, I could not help but think that adding GTX to its title is just downright misleading.

Would it not make greater sense just to call it what it is–a GTS–allowing one to accurately gauge its performance from its name alone? Am I the only person who compares mobile hardware with desktop hardware for a point of reference, especially when it comes to graphics performance?

Of course it would make more sense to name things accurately; but, for shameless marketing reasons nVidia continues to ‘upgrade’ their mobile chips through mischievous labeling that infers 1:1 performance with their desktop products. And no, I don’t feel that adding an ‘m’ to the product’s name does much to change this fact.

Marketing in the computer industry has always preyed upon the public’s ignorance for all things technical, and nVidia is hardly the only culprit in Silicon Valley with this bad habit. To some extent, one has to realize that this is just the reality of consumer marketing; but when a product is released and you are forced to google up spec sheets just to uncover basic information that you know is not accurately reflected by the product’s name, it can become quite annoying!

At least with CPU’s you probably know how many cores you’re getting and the bus speed it uses, because these features are not changing every week, and are also more standardized across models. Even CPU clockspeed, which first became an issue after AMD excluded this spec from the model name of their Athlon chips, is not such a problem any more because vendors have routinely stated it on the product’s title. But graphics hardware, and the seemingly infinite variety churned out by chip and card makers, is a great source of misinformation and confusion for PC buyers. It is possibly one factor contributing to the death of PC gaming. Why can’t we just have our hardware and gadgets named appropriately?

Even though nVidia appears well ahead of its rivals in the performance segment of the graphics market, you can hardly expect them to ‘downgrade’ their mobile line anytime soon by adopting clear and honest labeling. I hope that vendors eventually come to the rescue, as they did for CPU’s, and begin to provide vital information, such as clockspeed and the amount of stream processors upfront in the product’s title–right where it belongs. In fact, any laptop or desktop card maker that decides to take this route will have my attention, and just maybe, my money.

How would you have your PC hardware labeled? Should all the important specs be included in the title, or is this too hardcore for the masses?