At present it’s nothing more than an industry rumour, but it’s one that can’t come true soon enough. Nvidia is reportedly about to rebrand its graphics cards in a quest for much-needed simplicity.

Gone will be the 8000 and 9000 number schemes, with things going back to (kind of) the beginning. So we’ll see 100s and 200s, and all the divisions of ten in between; while the suffix letters will find their way to the beginning of the names, a la G100 and GT140.

Because that’s simple.

Perhaps I’m just being picky on a Friday afternoon, but surely I’m not alone in thinking simple would have been to do away with the ghastly prefix/suffix convention altogether, in an entirely fresh start. Can anyone even remember why a GT was decided to be faster than a GS, which in turn is faster than a G, in the first place?

If memory serves, it has something to do with performance cars (yawn), but it bears so little relevance to a graphics card that it now merely serves to confuse everyone – including us reviewers. Is a 9800 GS faster than a 9600 GT? By the suffix convention it surely should be, but by the number scheme it shouldn’t. And what the hell is a GTS when it’s at home?

ATI managed it pretty well by switching to its HD naming scheme: with the first three digits representing the series, family and iteration respectfully (i.e. HD 4870 is the 4-series, high-end 8 family, and the upper 70 rather than the mainstream 50). It’s not perfect, but it means you know instantly where a card sits in the grand scheme of things – an HD 4850 is clearly faster than an HD 4670.

But from what we’re hearing we’re stuck with those Nvidia prefixes for the forseeable future, and with ATI currently holding it down and giving it a Chinese burn in the graphics card wars, we can’t help but think that’s an opportunity for progress that the green team has missed.