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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."
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.
is the CPU manufacturers who won't provide updates/patches for "OLD" CPUs that are vulnerable to attacks.
That being said, I have a couple older linux boxes with NVidia drivers I WAS using as video/Kodi players that are just as bad....
This is the land of OEMs. You want to to make products that are in high demand, and have decent markup? Then you need to sign the contract with the supplier of those parts, and kiss the appropriate ass.
Nvidia has ALWAYS demanded more of OEMs over the years, WITHOUT ever giving a clear picture of what tthe rules are. . The give preferential treatment to different OEMs based on the days of the week! Remember when XFX was a PREFERRED NVIDIA OEM? Pepperidge Farms fucking does!
Or how about that time that Nvidia unleashed the pricing gauntlet,, forcing all OEMs to not drop below minimum pricing levels, basically stopping all entry-level competition?
OEMs are getting raped by Nvidia selling direct, but nobody complained about Founders Editions.
So now you lazy fucks suddenly care about Nvidia swinging their balls around the OEMs yet again? When the end result is just them forcing rebrands? I personally feel like having the exact same brands across chip lines makes shopping for cards confusing, so this isn't NEARLY the biggest dick Nvidia has made in their entire history. But the whiners will have you believe that ir's the END OF DAYS, even though they're still allowing everyone to continue to sell both Nvidia and AMD cards if they want.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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
Asus just introduced another brand for selling their high-end AMD gear: Arez. They're still selling the EXACT SAME GPUs, just without the ROG branding.
Just like they mysteriously introduced the STRIX brand of video cards about 5 years ago, and have for some fucking reason started selling motherboards under the brand (even though they are already silent)
If rebranding a product line is so fucking hard, why do OEMs do it every few years? Like Asus introducing STRIX, or AsRock introducing Taichi a couple years back, or MSI going crazy with Carbon and Mortar for their motherboards and Duke and Lightning for their GPUs? Or Gigabyte making up AORUS recently and sticking it on every fucking product they sell?
Rebranding is the easiest part of marketing a product. It's creating the RIGHT motherboard/GPU and getting it out there in reviews - THAT is the hard part of being an OEM.
Why do you people pretend that rebranding is hard? BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE CHANGE.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
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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.
It's not just forcing re-branding - it is limitations on how they brand, how they can market AMD cards. Not being able to make it easy for their customers to compare offerings from the two companies, or being prevented from marketing high performance gaming AMD devices as high performance gaming devices. Things that make it harder for AMD to get market share, because of Nvidia illegally using their market dominance.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The obvious, and unanswered question is - does that refer to all gaming brands a manufacturer may have, or a gaming brand? If the latter, there's absolutely no issue - MotherboardKing can have a Zoomzoom brand for Nvidia, and a Zipzip brand for AMD, each "aligned exclusively."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So far, all I have read about is a forced separation of brands. And in practice, this seems to mean that Nvidia gets the already established brands. That might be illegal and Nvidia probably bets on the new brands not getting as much attention. At least, it will take the graphics cards makers extra money to market the new brands.
Taking ASUS as example, ROG is now Nvidia only and AMD has been moved to AREZ. I wonder what Nvidia would have said if it was the other way around?
C - the footgun of programming languages
If rebranding a product line is so fucking hard, why do OEMs do it every few years?
That would be due to the stinking desperation of marketing douches ("marketing" as an adjective, not a verb... though that would be pretty desperate, too).
they stepped out of the console market because it wasn't profitable enough (they might have also got tired of being bullied by Microsoft & Sony, I can't imagine them doing well against those companies). The rumor mill was that AMD got better deals from MS & Sony because neither company was ready for nVidia to drop them. So it's been a nice infusion of cash.
I think the Tegra was suppose to be a game console like chip but when it's performance didn't match up with the 360 & PS3 (let alone the xbone & PS4) it floundered. The 30% premium on the app store doesn't help, and while side loading exists it's hard to enforce DRM with it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You missed out the sudden change of PCI bus architecture for graphics boards. One minute anyone could upgrade their PC simply by changing the graphics card. Suddenly they had to buy a brand new motherboard.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Not even close. The customer—who is already bewildered by this unnecessary proliferation of meaningless distinction—enters into a terminal state of Johnny-come-lately fatigue.
The young males who purchase these products are easily fatigued by any process that resembles bureaucracy. You don't need very many faux-affluent young men to wander up to the $2 slot machines of impatient, precipitous margin to make a real killing off of this strategy (by age 30 many of these men will seriously begin to wonder where all their money went, without even a plush leather sofa to show for it; the oil sands in Alberta was, until recently, exhibit A for achieving faux affluence in your early twenties).
Impatient men don't wander up to the unfamiliar. That takes cognitive investment. Your flash-in-the-pan branding effort is completely worthless in the high-traffic areas of the plush, suck-them-dry casino carpeting.
Aaaaand a certain master Fire Brand when bankrupt in Atlanta.
Glide API? 3DFX? Many 3DFX engineer going to work for Nvidia? Lawsuits......
Nichts neues
...used to be a library...now it's just a mind-cemetary
People are pissed because
a) It is anti-consumer
b) It is evil
c) It just happens to be really fuckign illegal.
Have you ever wondered why people get a glazed look in their eye when you talk to them?
Hello everyone. I would like to apologize for begin the raging asshole that I am. You see I am now undergoing a treatment program in an attempt to resolve my many issues. In going through this self discovery process I have discovered that a lot of my problems, especially with my inadequacy, centers around the fact that I was repressing my homosexuality. I now know that homosexuality isn't bad it is just the repression of it and the problems that causes are bad. Most notably his repression caused me to act out at anyone who rightfully pointed out my failings. I realize now that so much of what I said was just wrong. I also realize that I have developed serious problems such as stalking, harassment, poor physical health, and feelings of inadequacy. To this end I would like to apologize to the entire slashdot community.
APK
P.S. => As part of my treatment I have been forced to read what I wrote and realize now that all the mockery and insults I received were fully justified... apk
If rebranding a product line is so fucking hard, why do OEMs do it every few years?
That would be due to the stinking desperation of marketing douches
It's actually because of the idiocy of the consumer. While some consumers are savvy and well-educated about products, most simply buy whatever is the new hotness. You see it in cars, too; new models sell better even if they aren't better than the old models or the competition, just because they're new.
Marketing douches are taking advantage of the stupidity of consumers, but they didn't make them stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Impatient men don't wander up to the unfamiliar.
I've been working with PCs a long, long time. My first PC was an IBM PC-1, and my second PC was a 286@6 MHz. The first graphics cards I used which caused unscheduled reboots under Windows (3.1) were Mach32, and the second ones were Mach64. I had the 3DFx Voodoo and Voodoo 2, the Matrox Mystique, an NEC PowerVR card, a Permedia 2, and finally a TNT and then TNT2. And I still tried ATI cards, and they were garbage, so I stuck with nVidia. Yet, every third card I would try an ATI card because they were cheaper... and they never worked right and I always went back to nVidia, which always worked.
AMD STILL has poor drivers and drops support for old hardware sooner than nVidia does. People don't avoid AMD because it's not nVidia. People avoid AMD because they're still less competent than nVidia.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't give one half of one shit about power consumption, I have two GPUs in my system now and still have plenty of power supply headroom. What I care about is stability. I will buy AMD cards if they provide good results. As a consumer, I don't care how they get there, nor do I have the purchasing power to alter how they get there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This. DAAMIT graphics cards are blacklisted from all procurement processes I get a say in (personal and professional) because of consistently discontinuing driver support far too early. Good luck finding an ATI proprietary driver that supports a reasonably recent version of the Linux kernel and a >2-years-old graphics card at the same time (with the possible exception of some really popular models they really can't get away with discontinuing early).
Of course, you can go with the open-source driver. If you don't mind the latest several iterations of OpenGL and other standards being implemented mostly in software, if at all. At least, the proprietary driver lets you get the most out of the hardware. When not hampered by bugs, that is.
For all its evil, Nvidia does far better with the proprietary driver support. I can imagine this is a bit of a thankless job marketing-wise because the public narrative is mostly controlled by open-source zealots who blissfully ignore the proprietary drivers in favor of the open-source ones, but sales-wise, they seem to be doing good. I'm guessing there's a quiet demographic that cares about doing new stuff with old cards and that is large enough to justify putting some organisational effort into into actively maintaining long-lived/legacy driver versions.