Quote:The crux of the issue seems to be in that NVIDIA, while publicly touting transparency, is hiding some not so transparent clauses from the public's view. Namely, the fact that in order to become a part of NVIDIA's GPP program, partners must have its "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce." Bennet says that he has read NVIDIA papers, and these very words, in internal documents meant for NVIDIA's partners only; however, none of these have been made available as of time of writing, though that may be an effort to protect sources.

But what does this "exclusivity" mean? That partners would have to forego products from other brands (case in point, AMD) in order to be granted the GeForce partner status. And what do companies who achieve GPP status receive? Well, enough that it would make competition from other NVIDIA AIBs that didn't make the partner program extremely difficult - if not unfeasible. This is because GPP-branded companies would receive perks such as: high-effort engineering engagements (likely, aids to custom designs); early tech engagement; launch partner status (as in, being able to sell GeForce-branded products at launch date); game bundling; sales rebate programs; social media and PR support; marketing reports; and the ultimate kicker, Marketing Development Funds (MDF). This last one may be known to our more attentive readers, as it was part of Intel's "Intel Inside" marketing program which spurred... a pretty incredible anti-trust movement against the company.

Quote:MSI was caught openly slandering AMD Radeon graphics processors in promoting its MSI Gaming Series notebooks featuring NVIDIA GeForce graphics chips. The company is a signatory of the draconian GeForce Partner Program (GPP) by NVIDIA which, in boilerplate regulator-baiting language, tells its add-in card (AIC) partners not to use the same gaming sub-brand (eg: ASUS ROG, MSI Gaming, GIGABYTE Aorus, etc.,) for GPUs from any other brand (i.e. AMD Radeon). When it's in effect, ASUS, for example, can't sell an ROG Strix-branded Radeon graphics card, MSI can't sell an RX Vega 64 Gaming X, and it's probably why GIGABYTE stripped the RX 580 Gaming Box of Aorus branding.

Quote:HardOCP openly admits that AMD brought them this story in the first place, but just because a company alerts you to a story doesn’t mean the story isn’t true. A month ago, HardOCP alleged that Nvidia had kicked off a marketing campaign that required AIB’s to push AMD GPUs out of their premium brands in order to receive various benefits, including marketing dollars and GPU allocation. Today, we see evidence that more than one company has either launched a new AMD-specific brand (Asus), removed AMD from its top-brand gaming products (Asus, MSI), or is choosing to sell an identical product without its top-end branding, where the only difference is the presence of an AMD GPU as opposed to an Nvidia card (Gigabyte).

This evidence doesn’t automatically confirm HardOCP’s story is accurate, but it suggests that such strategic “realignments” are indeed taking place across multiple companies at more or less the same time. Given that companies don’t normally launch all-new brands with no reason given, and the fact that nobody seems to want to talk about the GPP in the first place, the evidence thus far supports HardOCP’s story, at least in broad strokes. And while some customers will scoff that this represents a meaningful restriction, this represents an area of disconnect between how companies think about branding and how consumers tend to think about it. Smart companies take brands very seriously. By conspicuously linking the top gaming brands from various AIBs to Nvidia and Nvidia alone, Team Green would win a major marketing coup — not by literally telling AIBs they can’t sell AMD GPUs, but by ensuring that the top marketing spots from a given partner company always held by GeForce.

• AMD has gotten better in its behavior
  
• The reason GamersNexus wasn't given Ryzen 2 samples was because of GamersNexus pushing back over the Threadripper embargo and saying that it was OK if AMD didn't send them anything, the issue was how the embargo was handled
  

Quote:Nvidia is no particular stranger to controversy, nor one to back away from a fight. Its GameWorks program, for example, has been controversial since its inception. Nvidia didn’t back away from it. Patrick Moorehead, writing for Forbes, makes the point that he thinks NV killed the program for the right reason, because the negativity around the program constituted a distraction. He states, however, that he had absolutely no reason to believe that Nvidia had engaged in any kind of illegal activity. This may be true. But it doesn’t explain the difference between Nvidia’s typically pugnacious attitude and willingness to engage in behaviors the community finds controversial (GameWorks) and its willingness to cancel the GPP after a much smaller period of time.

It’s possible that the GPU manufacturers themselves were sensitive to appearing to prioritize Nvidia over AMD, based on the way companies like MSI and Asus had stripped AMD cards of prominent branding and relegated them to second-class brands instead. But right now, Nvidia likely does dominate the high end of the market, which also makes this a bit less potent as far as an explanation.

I don’t like ending on a lame note, but as of right now, that’s where we are. Nvidia has never been a company to back down from a fight. It’s never been one to shy away from strong competition or from aggressively positioning its products. It’s not prima facie evident that any such arrangement with GPU manufacturers was illegal (what strikes someone as playing dirty and what’s actually illegal aren’t the same thing), and the idea that it just kinda quit a program it undoubtedly spent months designing and deploying seems an incomplete explanation at best. Nonetheless, for now, that’s what we’ve got.

Quote:Apparently the blow-back was harder than expected, and NVIDIA buckled. The main forces behind NVIDIA withdrawing GPP may not be fear of government regulators, but OEMs, such as Dell and HP, refusing to sign up. AMD is known in the OEM circles for great pricing, which is what scores it design wins with giants such as Apple. That's something big OEMs would never want to let go of. Had Dell, for example, signed up for GPP, it would have meant the end of AMD Radeon GPUs in Alienware desktops.

Far from sounding apologetic, NVIDIA's announcement of "pulling the plug" on GPP reads of the company begrudgingly ending the program, defending its "benefits to gamers" to the very end. NVIDIA didn't even give the announcement the dignity of a formal press-release, but a blog post, pasted verbatim:

Quote:This isn’t a very good explanation. Gamers are not confused by whether a box has an AMD or Nvidia GPU, because brands take pains to label products in a way that makes this information accessible. But Jen-Hsun’s statement can be read to imply that the program was canceled because of OEM pushback or user feedback. If I had to guess, I’d bet on the former. Nvidia has weathered storms of criticism before, on topics ranging from PhysX to GameWorks to DirectX 12. The company takes these sorts of challenges in stride.

Quote:This message slipped the radar until now since, well - AREZ really only had some 129 followers at the time of the tweet. Which just really goes to show how NVIDIA's ploy might have worked in muscling out market recognition of some of its competition's products.