GeForce 3 Series - Product Positioning

Product Positioning

NVIDIA refreshed the lineup in October 2001 with the release of the GeForce 3 Ti200 and Ti500. This coincided with ATI's releases of the top-line Radeon 8500 and mid-range Radeon 7500. The Ti500 has higher core and memory clocks (240 MHz core/250 MHz RAM) than the original GeForce 3 (200 MHz/230 MHz), and generally matches the Radeon 8500. The Ti200 was a cheaper card meant to compete in the mid-range segment. It is clocked lower (175 MHz/200 MHz) yet it surpasses the Radeon 7500 in speed and feature set outside of dual-monitor implementation.

The GeForce 2 and GeForce3 lines were replaced in early 2002 by the GeForce 4 MX and Ti lines, respectively. The GeForce 4 Ti was very similar to its predecessor; the main differences were higher core and memory speeds, a revised memory controller, improved vertex and pixel shaders, hardware anti-aliasing and DVD playback. Proper dual-monitor support was also brought over from the GeForce 2 MX. With the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 as the new flagship product, this was the beginning of the end of the GeForce 3 Ti 500 which was already difficult to produce due to poor yields, and it was later completely replaced by the Ti 4200.

However, the GeForce3 Ti200 was still kept in production for a short while as it occupied a spot between the (delayed) GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and GeForce 4 MX 460 in performance. Despite the Ti200's positioning, which would have kept the chip going until the end of 2002, it was discontinued due to naming confusion with the GeForce 4 MX and Ti lines. The discontinuing of the GeForce3 Ti200 and Radeon 8500LE disappointed many enthusiasts, because the performance-oriented Ti 4200 had not yet fallen to midrange prices, while the mass-market Radeon 9000 was not as fast as the Ti200 and 8500LE.

The original GeForce3 and the Ti500 derivative were only released in 64 MiB configurations throughout their lifetimes. This was also mostly true of the Ti200, a handful of third-parties did sell 128 MiB versions without much success since it was found that the GeForce3 got little performance gain from the extra VRAM. The Radeon 8500 series on the other hand did benefit significantly from 128 MiB, which also explained the reason why Nvidia quickly replaced the GeForce 3 with the GeForce 4 Ti.