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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.
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 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."
Almost every idiot I see complaining is running OCs that no sane person should even attempt with liquid cooling because suddenly VRM airflow no longer exists due to the missing heatsink/fan combo that usually sits there. "My system shuts down with an overheating warning or thermal throttling issue! This GPU sucks!" Yea, GPU probably ain't your issue, because not a single GPU I've ever had has given me a problem, from Trident, Cirrus Logic, STi, S3, ATi, nVidia, or even Rendition.
They just don't know how to build a stable fucking system because they do stupid shit like only reading logical increments.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You want to know why? Take a look at the branding icons on every new game. Smack dab on it you'll see nVidia's logo. This can even extend to the intro screens (I still remember some having "the way it's meant to be played" on it).
The reason for it is simple - nVidia sends engineers out to game companies to optimize the game engine for their GPU. And not just that, but they have a ton of technology they offer game companies to incorporate into their games just to make it better.
And just like how a certain CPU chip manufacturer used less optimized paths when the code ran on other CPUs, well, you can bet a lot of the nVidia GPU code probably runs poorly on AMD chips. Whether intentionally or not (i.e., they should disable those features), it's hard to say.
Anyhow, I'm half wondering if it's because of the partnership Intel and AMD have now - the #1 GPU shipper in the world is Intel, and AMD GPUs are going to be featured on-package with Intel CPUs. You can bet that combination would make nVidia a little bit nervous
Even more, you can bet a few of those are destined for Apple products - Apple loves to use Iris Pro graphics, but with this new combination, Apple may use these Intel+AMD chips instead.
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
Lets not forget that nVidia got its ass handed to it in the console market while simultaneously Google is attacking the scientific end of the GPU market with their TPU's.
Meanwhile everybody and their grandmother are making ARM's, so what the fuck is nVidia Tegra but just another mobile solution.
"His name was James Damore."
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).