Nvidia Shuts Down Its GeForce Partner Program, Citing Misinformation (theregister.co.uk) 82
In a blog post on Friday, Nvidia announced it is "pulling the plug" on the GeForce Partner Program (GPP) due to the company's unwillingness to combat "rumors" and "mistruths" about the platform. The GPP has only been active for a couple of months. It was launched as a way for gamers to know exactly what they're buying when shopping for a new gaming PC. "With this program, partners would provide full transparency regarding the installed hardware and software in their products," reports Digital Trends. From the report: Shortly after the launch, unnamed sources from add-in card and desktop/laptop manufacturers came forward to reveal that the program will likely hurt consumer choice. Even more, they worried that some of the agreement language may actually be illegal while the program itself could disrupt the current business they have with AMD and Intel. They also revealed one major requirement: The resulting product sports the label "[gaming brand] Aligned Exclusively with GeForce." As an example, if Asus wanted to add its Republic of Gamers (RoG) line to Nvidia's program, it wouldn't be allowed to sell RoG products with AMD-based graphics. Of course, manufacturers can choose whether or not to join Nvidia's program, but membership supposedly had its "perks" including access to early technology, sales rebate programs, game bundling, and more.
According to Nvidia, all it asked of its partners was to "brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear." The company says it didn't want "substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon." Specifications for desktops and laptops tend to list their graphics components and PC gamers are generally intelligent shoppers that don't need any clarification. Regardless, Nvidia is pulling the controversial program because the "rumors, conjecture, and mistruths go far beyond" the program's intent.
According to Nvidia, all it asked of its partners was to "brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear." The company says it didn't want "substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon." Specifications for desktops and laptops tend to list their graphics components and PC gamers are generally intelligent shoppers that don't need any clarification. Regardless, Nvidia is pulling the controversial program because the "rumors, conjecture, and mistruths go far beyond" the program's intent.
How you know Nvidia is lying (Score:5, Funny)
PC gamers are generally intelligent shoppers that don't need any clarification
Re:How you know Nvidia is lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Nvidia didn't say that. Digitaltrends did.
Mind you it doesn't make the program any less questionable, especially if the techno jargon you're hiding is the performance features.
Hey come buy the new Ford Mustang by Ford, because Ford Ford. It has some seats, and all the horsepowers. It has the things you expect, supports all kinds of drivers, and comes in red and black, wheels included in price.
God I miss car analogies.
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lmao, me too cause that was a good one.
Re:How you know Nvidia is lying (Score:5, Funny)
God I miss car analogies.
Relied on those for years but for having to explain the necessity of 'Windows Reinstallations' to my clients, my mainstay was the following:
Microsoft products are toilet paper grade... which is perfectly fine for some tasks... but when your toilet paper gets dirty, do you try to scrub out the shit-stains? No; you get a fresh roll.
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but when your toilet paper gets dirty, do you try to scrub out the shit-stains? No; you get a fresh roll.
Careful there's been a huge resurgence in reusable diapers as of late :)
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but when your toilet paper gets dirty, do you try to scrub out the shit-stains? No; you get a fresh roll.
Careful there's been a huge resurgence in reusable diapers as of late :)
Make sure you google "family cloth", you'll be glad you did :)
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What's the difference between a car marketing phrase writer and a computer marketing phrase writer? The car marketing phrase write knows when he's lying.
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They're marketeers; they are ALWAYS lying.
The computer marketeer is just lying to himself as well.
Re: How you know Nvidia is lying (Score:1)
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Nice catch!
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Not to be confused with a Trump algebra, which also generally involves lies.
And you had to bring politics into a conversation/thread that had nothing, and I mean NOTHING to with it. WHY? Does it somehow make you feel better? I guess I am just getting old because it makes no sense to me what so ever why peeps here do this. It's not funny, It doesn't make one look or sound smarter. Adds NOTHING to the conversation. To me it sounds like this. We love cars, cars are great. cars can go fast. Trump. The yellow ones are better.
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are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I heard the entire document was leaked absolutely word for word verbatim.
Who did you hear that from?
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Nice try Nvidia.
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https://www.hardocp.com/news/2... [hardocp.com] read the other links. Nvidia has also apparently blacklisted HardOCP for posting all of this information to the public.
Seriously, every single gamer out there should look hard at what nvidia did, say "fuck you" buy a AMD card on their next upgrade/new rig, send them a picture and tell them that this is the result of the GPP program.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Now, this isn't a particularly interesting claim, but "Kyle says he saw it" isn't proof of any sort.
Did you read the links? Apparently not. Go and do that now, you'll get there eventually kiddo.
Re: are you serious? (Score:1)
Citation needed.
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For one example, it literally took six months for AMD to fix a critical crash flaw in their drivers effecting Blizzard's Overwatch. Information is documented by Blizzard staff themselves: https://eu.battle.net/forums/e... [battle.net]
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People actually play overwatch? The community that progressives claim is so toxic, that blizzard is looking over your shoulder and digging through your social media posts so they can ban you.
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Isn't this what Intel was fined for? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually think Nvidia has a bit of a point here, even if their "program" has some serious problems.
If I build a brand of graphics cards based on Nvidia chips... let's call it BlazeX... and I spend years building brand loyalty to BlazeX as the fastest cards available, Nvidia is hidden behind that brand. They'd like for people to associate BlazeX only with Nvidia chips, so when the BlazeX Value comes out, it has an Nvidia chipset and not an AMD or Intel chipset. In that scenario, the Nvidia-built reputation is selling AMD and Intel chips. Of course Nvidia finds that annoying.
This program would also provide Nvidia some room to breath if AMD happened to leapfrog them in one of the chipset cycles and come out with a much faster product. BlazeX would still have the cache of being the fastest and they'd still sell a lot of Nvidia chips while they played catchup.
Which of course explains why the manufacturers don't want to do things this way. They want people to associate their brand with "the best", not the chipset. That way you will always buy from them, even if they switch to Intel chips at a later date.
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Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not my understanding of what happened. NVIDIA said that NVIDIA products needed their own brand that was separate from the AMD brand. Suppliers did have the option of creating a separate brand just for NVIDIA, but none did. Instead, they kept the gaming brand they already had and made it exclusively for NVIDIA while some created a second brand for AMD.
For instance, ASUS kept the ROG (Republic of Gamers) for NVIDIA, but created AREZ for AMD for graphics cards. There was nothing in the deal requiring that to happen. They could have kept ROG for AMD and made a separate brand for NVIDIA.
In practice, though -- everyone knows NVIDIA's cards are better for the most part on the high end, so of course the trusted high-end gaming brand goes to NVIDIA.
You know ASUS is likely unhappy about having to carry a second brand just for AMD. They have ROG motherboards and graphics cards and would like to just keep ROG for everything high-end and high-quality regardless of what's powering it. They will probably end the AREZ line soon now that the program is cancelled.
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https://www.asus.com/Laptops/R... [asus.com]
ROG - Republic Of Gamers
Ryzen 5 or 7 processor
Radeon RX580
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Exactly this. They may also have discovered what kinds of penalties can actually be imposed for doing something like this.
Re: Translation (Score:2)
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AMD's cards have gotten surprisingly better over the years. They're actually considered the best choice for Linux gaming. The official drivers are good, but the open source drivers are even better.
It used to always be the case that no self-respecting Linux user used ATI/AMD cards. You'd buy an NVIDIA because they're the only cards that had any decent driver support. You'd also run the official drivers because nv sucks all the dicks and nouveau is only barely tolerable for non-gaming purposes.
We truly ar
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There certainly are a lot of crappy cards out there claiming to be good enough for modern gaming. Where your tirade breaks down is that nVidia is no less guilty of it than anyone else. It's called having a product line, and a low-end nVidia card falls far behind a high end Radeon card.
It was stupid to begin with (Score:4, Insightful)
The card manufacturer brands simply aren't that strong, all the publicity about about brand splitting was just giving AMD free advertising with no benefit to NVIDIA. Worse, if they force ASUS to create new brands for AMD they might just launch Freesync only high end monitors ,,, which is not at all to NVIDIA's benefit.
Some manager thought he was clever and tried to turn third party hardware partnership into just as effective an anti-competitive tool as software support, but they just don't work the same. Not so clever.
Re: It was stupid to begin with (Score:2)
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More like caught with their hand in the cookie-jar (Score:3)
And now they claim that their probably quite illegal act has just been "misunderstood" and is hence somebody else's fault. I think they pretty much panicked when they talked to some actually competent lawyers about what they had done. May also gave gotten some friendly warnings and an ultimatum from the competition.
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Telling people that they "misunderstood" when they understood perfectly well is gaslighting. If that's really what's happening then it's really sad that they stoop to that level.
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I agree. Unfortunately also quite non-surprising. Just a standard technique to avoid responsibility and put a "spin" on things.
Are we clear? Crystal. (Score:2)
According to Nvidia, all it asked of its partners was to "brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear."
My laptop has a sticker on it that says "Powered by nVidia Quadro" How much more clear do they need to be?
Yeah right... (Score:2)
"Misinformation".
Caught trying to bully people for exclusivity, products already came out to prove the dirty tactic was working, and refused to reply to questions made by costumers, people covering the subject, and whatnot.
More likely caught red handed with shady tactics to corner the market and wanted to avoid a lawsuit.
See guys, it wasn't only that nVidia was trying to put nVidia products into a separate brand than the competition, it's that they wanted exclusivity, they were shutting down access for blog