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Nvidia Shuts Down Its GeForce Partner Program, Citing Misinformation (theregister.co.uk)
In a blog post on Friday, Nvidia announced it is "pulling the plug" on the GeForce Partner Program (GPP) due to the company's unwillingness to combat "rumors" and "mistruths" about the platform. The GPP has only been active for a couple of months. It was launched as a way for gamers to know exactly what they're buying when shopping for a new gaming PC. "With this program, partners would provide full transparency regarding the installed hardware and software in their products," reports Digital Trends. From the report: Shortly after the launch, unnamed sources from add-in card and desktop/laptop manufacturers came forward to reveal that the program will likely hurt consumer choice. Even more, they worried that some of the agreement language may actually be illegal while the program itself could disrupt the current business they have with AMD and Intel. They also revealed one major requirement: The resulting product sports the label "[gaming brand] Aligned Exclusively with GeForce." As an example, if Asus wanted to add its Republic of Gamers (RoG) line to Nvidia's program, it wouldn't be allowed to sell RoG products with AMD-based graphics. Of course, manufacturers can choose whether or not to join Nvidia's program, but membership supposedly had its "perks" including access to early technology, sales rebate programs, game bundling, and more.
According to Nvidia, all it asked of its partners was to "brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear." The company says it didn't want "substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon." Specifications for desktops and laptops tend to list their graphics components and PC gamers are generally intelligent shoppers that don't need any clarification. Regardless, Nvidia is pulling the controversial program because the "rumors, conjecture, and mistruths go far beyond" the program's intent.
According to Nvidia, all it asked of its partners was to "brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear." The company says it didn't want "substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon." Specifications for desktops and laptops tend to list their graphics components and PC gamers are generally intelligent shoppers that don't need any clarification. Regardless, Nvidia is pulling the controversial program because the "rumors, conjecture, and mistruths go far beyond" the program's intent.
I actually think Nvidia has a bit of a point here, even if their "program" has some serious problems.
If I build a brand of graphics cards based on Nvidia chips... let's call it BlazeX... and I spend years building brand loyalty to BlazeX as the fastest cards available, Nvidia is hidden behind that brand. They'd like for people to associate BlazeX only with Nvidia chips, so when the BlazeX Value comes out, it has an Nvidia chipset and not an AMD or Intel chipset. In that scenario, the Nvidia-built reputation is selling AMD and Intel chips. Of course Nvidia finds that annoying.
This program would also provide Nvidia some room to breath if AMD happened to leapfrog them in one of the chipset cycles and come out with a much faster product. BlazeX would still have the cache of being the fastest and they'd still sell a lot of Nvidia chips while they played catchup.
Which of course explains why the manufacturers don't want to do things this way. They want people to associate their brand with "the best", not the chipset. That way you will always buy from them, even if they switch to Intel chips at a later date.
That's not my understanding of what happened. NVIDIA said that NVIDIA products needed their own brand that was separate from the AMD brand. Suppliers did have the option of creating a separate brand just for NVIDIA, but none did. Instead, they kept the gaming brand they already had and made it exclusively for NVIDIA while some created a second brand for AMD.
For instance, ASUS kept the ROG (Republic of Gamers) for NVIDIA, but created AREZ for AMD for graphics cards. There was nothing in the deal requiring that to happen. They could have kept ROG for AMD and made a separate brand for NVIDIA.
In practice, though -- everyone knows NVIDIA's cards are better for the most part on the high end, so of course the trusted high-end gaming brand goes to NVIDIA.
You know ASUS is likely unhappy about having to carry a second brand just for AMD. They have ROG motherboards and graphics cards and would like to just keep ROG for everything high-end and high-quality regardless of what's powering it. They will probably end the AREZ line soon now that the program is cancelled.