Slashdot Mirror
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."
The crux of the issue with NVIDIA GPP comes down to a single requirement in order to be part of GPP. In order to have access to the GPP program, its partners must have its "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce." I have read documents with this requirement spelled out on it.
What would it mean to have your "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce?" The example that will likely resonate best with HardOCP readers is the ASUS Republic of Gamers brand. I have no knowledge if ASUS is a GPP partner, I am simply using the ROG brand hypothetically. If ASUS is an NVIDIA GPP partner, and it wants to continue to use NVIDIA GPUs in its ROG branded video cards, computers, and laptops, it can no longer sell any other company's GPUs in ROG products. So if ASUS want to keep building NVIDIA-based ROG video cards, it can no longer sell AMD-based ROG video cards, and be a GPP partner.
What is disturbing is that 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. From all we have talked to, the issue of not allocating GPU inventories to non-GPP partners have not been spelled out contractually, but is rather done on a wink and a nod.
It really saddens me that every time I think, "maybe Nvidia has changed their ways" something like this happens. Anyone remember when Nvidia bought PhysX? Not only if you were using AMD card as a primary card you couldn't use Nvidia GPU acceleration for Physics, you couldn't use it at all if you had AMD card in your machine. Not even if you had top of the line Nvidia card and one of the cheapest AMD. To make Nvidia look better they also disabled multithreading from CPU, just to be sure Nvidia cards were the way it was meant to be played. You might say it is understandable since Nvidia paid a lot for PhysX. I guess that is matter of opinion, personally, I think they should have enabled PhysX as long as it was running on Nvidia hardware, and not disable it if a system had AMD card (there is a difference albeit a small one). Although, I can understand NV frustration to a situation where competitors card ran PhysX better, but that was just overkill reaction to that.
Then came the memory-gate. Why would anyone think it is a good idea to have more ram, if that ram is excruciatingly slow compared to rest of the ram available? Yea, marketing is always BS, but come on. Why are you pushing the limit NV?
Anyone remember their attitude towards MadOnion (Futuremark now). Both AMD and Nvidia were caught making optimizations to drivers specifically for benchmarks, with two companies having a huge difference in their responses. ATI/AMD responded that it would stop making such optimizations. Nvidia in their arrogance responded that they would never stop making optimizations for the benchmark, causing benchmark company to validate drivers before results were deemed valid.
Personally, I would slap Nvidia huge fine, similar to what Intel had to pay by doing somewhat same to AMD.I mean tell me how is this any different? Intel wouldn't give discounts to OEM:s who sold competitors product, Nvidia won't give discounts if competitors cards are being sold with most marketable naming in which Nvidia has absolutely no trademarks or any other rights that I am aware of.
but the reason I don't buy AMD is I never stop hearing about all the issues their graphics cards have. Every time a new game comes out the Steam forums are filled with folks complaining about AMD with at least a 3 to 1 ratio to the nVidia comments. Moreover I play a lot of old games (I only just got around to playing Fallout NV last year and I fire up older stuff like Psyconauts or NOLF from time to time). nVidia's compatibility with old and/or obscure titles is just better.
I miss the better image quality AMD had (to this day nVidia cuts corners on rendering to get better framerates, it's especially noticable in Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing Transformed) but I'm 40 and I just don't have the time or patience to screw around with drivers and tweaks to get a game working. I know a lot of that isn't AMD's fault, but that doesn't make my games run.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/