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AMD Wants To Hear From GPU Resellers and Partners Bullied By Nvidia (forbes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Nvidia may not be talking about its GeForce Partner Program, but AMD has gone from silent to proactive in less than 24 hours. Hours ago Scott Herkelman, Corporate VP and General Manager of AMD Radeon Gaming, addressed AMD resellers via Twitter, not only acknowledging the anti-competitive tactics Nvidia has leveraged against them, but inviting others to share their stories. The series of tweets coincides with an AMD sales event held in London this week. This was preceded by an impassioned blog post from Herkelman yesterday where he comes out swinging against Nvidia's GeForce Partner Program, and references other closed, proprietary technologies like G-Sync and GameWorks.
AMD's new mantra is "Freedom of Choice," a tagline clearly chosen to combat Nvidia's new program which is slowly taking gaming GPU brands from companies like MSI and Gigabyte, and locking them exclusively under the GeForce banner. The GeForce Partner Program also seems to threaten the business of board partners who are are not aligned with the program. Here's what Herkelman -- who was a former GeForce marketing executive at Nvidia -- had to say on Twitter: "I wanted to personally thank all of our resellers who are attending our AMD sales event in London this week, it was a pleasure catching up with you and thank you for your support. Many of you told me how our competition tries to use funding and allocation to restrict or block [...] your ability to market and sell Radeon based products in the manner you and your customers desire. I want to let you know that your voices have been heard and that I welcome any others who have encountered similar experiences to reach out to me..." The report adds that Kyle Bennett of HardOCP, the author who broke the original GPP story, "says that Nvidia is beginning a disinformation campaign against him, claiming that he was paid handsomely for publishing the story."
AMD's new mantra is "Freedom of Choice," a tagline clearly chosen to combat Nvidia's new program which is slowly taking gaming GPU brands from companies like MSI and Gigabyte, and locking them exclusively under the GeForce banner. The GeForce Partner Program also seems to threaten the business of board partners who are are not aligned with the program. Here's what Herkelman -- who was a former GeForce marketing executive at Nvidia -- had to say on Twitter: "I wanted to personally thank all of our resellers who are attending our AMD sales event in London this week, it was a pleasure catching up with you and thank you for your support. Many of you told me how our competition tries to use funding and allocation to restrict or block [...] your ability to market and sell Radeon based products in the manner you and your customers desire. I want to let you know that your voices have been heard and that I welcome any others who have encountered similar experiences to reach out to me..." The report adds that Kyle Bennett of HardOCP, the author who broke the original GPP story, "says that Nvidia is beginning a disinformation campaign against him, claiming that he was paid handsomely for publishing the story."
In order to have access to the GPP program, its partners must have its "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce."
Using incentives or threat of coercion to gain exclusivity is considered an anti-competitive practice. In America, it is usually only prosecuted against companies with "market dominance". Nvidia has about a 75% market share.
we have been told that if a company does not participate in GPP, those companies feel as if NVIDIA would hold back allocation of GPUs from their inventories.
If that threat was made in writing, or in front of multiple witnesses, then they should report it to the FTC.
It seems that they are demanding that OEMs stop selling AMD devices under their Gaming brands, thereby trying to shut AMD out of the premium GPU market.
It may turn out that they are only requiring that manufacturers do not sell AMD and Nvidia GPUs under the same brand name - which is reasonable I suppose, but really they should just stay out of it. OEMs should be left to brand their products as they wish, and it would be great for comsumers if they put AMD and Nvidia powered cards with similar performance side by side on the shelf, packed similarly and with similar part numbers, apart from the acutal AMD and NVidia trademarks.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Thanks to the crypto-currency miners, nVidia have a narrow window of opportunity to make a shed-load of money... They are experiencing a situation in which people are buying their cards as fast or faster than they can make them.
This market-driven scarcity gives nVidia plausible deniability when it comes to any situation in which they may "have no available product" to ship to OEMs that do not play by their rules.
It is such a shame that nVidia would choose to take advantage of a situation like this to try and squeeze AMD out of the market. Especially as the people that suffer the most are the enthusiasts willing to pay for this sort of technology, because a crippled or market-squeezed AMD is bad for innovation, bad for price competition and will lead to the sort of stagnation in the sector that we've seen from Intel in the CPU space.
I've been a user of nVidia technology since they bought out the 3dfx/Voodoo technology, but if this article has substance then I think it will be time to move to AMD.
It would be nice to see a government regulator take a look at this.
Every third graphic card I got AMD. Every single AMD card was a total nightmare. In order to get them to work at all reliably it was necessary to load hacked drivers (DnA) since otherwise they would just fail and fail. Then I gave up and just went with nVidia and I haven't had a GPU problem in years. I'd love to buy AMD, especially since their Linux support has gotten so good, but it's more important to me that my system work.
If AMD wants me to buy their shit, they have to make it work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"