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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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