EXACTLY.. outside of a few fanboi/gurl message boards and forums were testosterone gets replaced with nerd rage and Ghz who really gives a rats arse ? Nv did it and yeah they drew much nerd furor however that was I'm surely greatly outweighed by the heaps and heaps of cash to help soak up the geek tears.
Those "fanboi/gurl"'s aren't the ones that'll be affected or hurt by this. It's the general population who likes computers and gaming on PC but don't spend time on enthusiast/tech/gaming forums that are going to be the ones most hurt by it.
Why so hung on naming conventions? Price and performance will determine the cards worth. At the end of the day, consumers who follow this stuff will quickly look past the name and play the numbers game.
Even when a non enthusiast game upgrading their video card will end up on a site like Newegg and do a sort by price to see what is in their range. Then they might be inclined to go look at reviews of the cards in their price range based on the first 3 google hits. That right there is the end of the average purchase cycle.
I must be the only one that knows everyday professional workers that don't buy everything at newegg or even online. At my weekend gaming group other than me 1 person buys most stuff online, another occasionally buys stuff online and the rest still go to Gamestop/Best Buy/Walmart/name your own brick and mortar store.
When I mentioned how cheap 8 gigs of DDR3 were most of them were shocked as they generally buy a computer direct from an OEM and don't trust hand built computers. On the rare occasions they feel the need to upgrade (like one has to do because SC2 runs great on his comp but Civilzation 5 doesn't) they once again either go direct to the OEM or head down to best buy and buy something off the shelf.
AMD's naming scheme over the past few years since the introduction of the 3xxx series has made this a relatively painless, error free, predictable and easy process for them. They don't even need to ask me advice when it comes to the last few generations of Radeon graphics cards. Nvidia on the hand...OMG the amount of questions I've had to answer. Many have switched to Radeon cards just due to the non-hassle of buying a video card.
Obviously any name change isn't going to affect a tech enthusiast or a fanboi/gurl (from first quote). It's going to impact those people that don't have the time nor the inclination to follow forums and tech sites yet still enjoy PC gaming. Some of them never have, and some of them used to but have since stopped once they got their own house, wife, kids, etc...
And AMD's consistency since the 3xxx series has been a godsend to people like them. It's one of the reasons I've been on Nvidia's arse for the past few years about their rampant rebranding.
Regards,
SB
