nVidia GeForce Partner Program: Well Intention Marketing or Anti-Competitive

[Mihle]

46 minutes ago, asus killer said:

on the contrary, i actually remember better that time then the glory days of Nvidia. For a long time and until last year i kept away from PC's. Still it was a long time ago for technology standards. Still you hardly have to make an effort to understand gpu market to know how much stronger is Nvidia nowadays. Even away i knew Nvidia were the gpu to get.

Didn't AMD did the same with Vega with HBM just to stop their power hungry gpus and try to compete with Nvidia?

 

Could be really wrong but if Vega had beaten the 1080ti and the next release did the same, in no time we would be having the opposite discussion. No marketing from Nvidia could change that.

 

Still standing by my comment, a lot is AMD's fault and the constant underperformance of their products.

Nvidia card would well better even if AMD made GPUs 2 gens in a row that was let's say 10% better.

Because the Nvidia/Getforce brand.

 

A lot of consumers don't look at benchmarks, they just go after a brand in the price range they want. Sometimes that brand is Nvidia/Getforce. Other times it's Asus/ROG/Strix/MSI. Sometimes it's both. And to change that it takes more than 2 generations of being simply better. Well, at least without doing almost perfect marketing.

[Razor01]

Just now, leadeater said:

lol I went through and did the average for all of the games max settings only, exactly 0% average difference but there are rounding errors cos lazy ish math. The differences is far greater for the X800 on slightly lower settings but I can only be bothered to do it once, without AA and AF on all resolutions it much more than 5% though. Reminds me now of all the AA talk back then tanking ATI cards.

 

Well don't' remember exactly the reason for the AA performance differences back then, just too long ago, but it was due to the way the filter algo's were implemented.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Razor01 said:

There are ways to use it as evidence, not directly though.  They have to call in the partners to testify to the affects of the contract.  But at that point yeah its pretty easy to do.

And if a partner is not willing to testify? Maybe due to penalty clauses or maybe they simply don't want to for other reasons.

[Razor01]

Just now, leadeater said:

And if a partner is not willing to testify? Maybe due to penalty clauses or maybe they simply don't want to for other reasons.

 

 

At that point nV can't take actions to hurt that partner though, it would be way to obvious and this is also why injunctions will be in place by that point, so taking such actions aren't possible or heavily limited.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Razor01 said:

Well don't' remember exactly the reason for the AA performance differences back then, just too long ago, but it was due to the way the filter algo's were implemented.

I don't remember much either, looking at those numbers only reminded me of it because I noticed it while scrolling through them. On Farcry 1600x1200 ATI takes a 54% performance hit and Nvidia takes a 29%, kinda crazy.

[Razor01]

4 minutes ago, Mihle said:

Nvidia card would well better even if AMD made GPUs 2 gens in a row that was let's say 10% better.

Because the Nvidia/Getforce brand.

 

A lot of consumers don't look at benchmarks, they just go after a brand in the price range they want. Sometimes that brand is Nvidia/Getforce. Other times it's Asus/ROG/Strix/MSI. Sometimes it's both. And to change that it takes more than 2 generations of being simply better. Well, at least without doing almost perfect marketing.

This is an angle nV is playing on but I don't think from an AIB point of view, cause people that pull apart their computers to put something in or replace something, they are pretty savvy about their hardware for the most part, from OEM's though, people that buy those, they really don't know much (generalization of course).

[Razor01]

Just now, leadeater said:

I don't remember much either, looking at those numbers only reminded me of it because I noticed it while scrolling through them. On Farcry 1600x1200 ATI takes a 54% performance hit and Nvidia takes a 29%, kinda crazy.

 

 

yeah they were using view angle adaptive AA algo's, ATi's would be better in some games, nV's better in others, both had different performance hits in different games, it was really weird.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, asus killer said:

i'm not going to disagree with you, still Maketing, nice boxes, ROG brand, bla bla bla vs 1080ti, who wins?

 

when you have 2 brands, and when we talk about gpus (not graphic cards) and 1080ti is almost in everyones mouths when someone mentions gpus what can you actually do with marketing against that?

You can do "1080ti GAMING", that's what  

 

2 hours ago, asus killer said:

If i were AMD that's were i would focus, beat the Nvidia flagship, and of course without needing a nuclear powered PSU or some other drawback.

I never understood that. When I shop for a GPU, I'm usually looking at things that cost 3 or 4 times less than any flagship, and I never had trouble finding options of all colors. It's like, I don't know, comparing Xeons and Opterons to decide between an i3 or an APU, or buying a Fiat based on whether Ferrari won the F1 championship...

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

or buying a Fiat based on whether Ferrari won the F1 championship...

People actually do that, maybe not for Fiat's though heh. Lots of people brought Quattros, Evos and WRXs because they were really good rally cars, because we need that in town right? Car people lol, not that I'm not guilty of such things when it comes to cars. 

[laminutederire]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

People actually do that, maybe not for Fiat's though heh. Lots of people brought Quattros, Evos and WRXs because they were really good rally cars, because we need that in town right? Car people lol, not that I'm not guilty of such things when it comes to cars. 

Cars are for plebs anyways, real men take jet planes!

 

24 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I don't remember much either, looking at those numbers only reminded me of it because I noticed it while scrolling through them. On Farcry 1600x1200 ATI takes a 54% performance hit and Nvidia takes a 29%, kinda crazy.

Isn't that still a bit true even today?

I personally disable AA in most cases since, except in a few games 1440p is sharp enough for aliasing to never be looking awful, and it allows to go from 50-60fps to 90 fps sometimes.

But speaking to people about it, they don't see as much a frame rate boost with their Nvidia cards than I do with my fury. That's something to pay attentions in benchmarks as well. AA is becoming more and more useless but yet it murders frame rate and I don't understand why reviews often keep AA on even on medium or low settings. That could eventually lead to a bias towards Nvidia for something that does not necessarily mean much in every situations.

[Razor01]

25 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

Cars are for plebs anyways, real men take jet planes!

 

Isn't that still a bit true even today?

I personally disable AA in most cases since, except in a few games 1440p is sharp enough for aliasing to never be looking awful, and it allows to go from 50-60fps to 90 fps sometimes.

But speaking to people about it, they don't see as much a frame rate boost with their Nvidia cards than I do with my fury. That's something to pay attentions in benchmarks as well. AA is becoming more and more useless but yet it murders frame rate and I don't understand why reviews often keep AA on even on medium or low settings. That could eventually lead to a bias towards Nvidia for something that does not necessarily mean much in every situations.

 

 

Well AA now there is no angle dependent filtering, with the g80 and I think it was the r600 might be wrong here, both AMD and nV removed those algo's,   Now its based on the filtering units (ROP's), and their capabilities.  nV hasn't changed much in their ROP's for a long time, so that is why they need more ROP's vs AMD cards, AMD has been slowing adding more performance to their ROP's when filtering is concerned so they have been able to keep their ROP counts lower and still get very good AA performance out of them.  I think it was GCN where AMD mentioned they revamped their ROPs for more performance, it was in an interview with one of the major review sites. The review site asked why the didn't change their ROP amounts.

[asus killer]

56 minutes ago, Mihle said:

Nvidia card would well better even if AMD made GPUs 2 gens in a row that was let's say 10% better.

Because the Nvidia/Getforce brand.

 

A lot of consumers don't look at benchmarks, they just go after a brand in the price range they want. Sometimes that brand is Nvidia/Getforce. Other times it's Asus/ROG/Strix/MSI. Sometimes it's both. And to change that it takes more than 2 generations of being simply better. Well, at least without doing almost perfect marketing.

i agree that not everybody cares about benchmarks, but there is a lot of word of mouth and youtubers influences and even builders choices, that would all sway in favor of AMD. I believe so.

 

1 hour ago, Humbug said:

If there is a brand hijacking deal forcing AMD out of existing brands then a lot of people care. Or else this whole thing would not be newsworthy. People care not just because of their own choices, sure educated consumers can still buy AMD. But many of those educated consumers also do not want additional market barriers put up against AMD because they want AMD to remain profitable and grow (for the good of the ecosystem) which means also being in a position to appeal to non-educated consumers by not being locked out of established gaming brands.

even in the worst scenario of no ROG for AMD i really think this is not as bad for AMD as making worst products that the competition, that's what really gets them down. And i knon Ryzen is good but coffee lake is better, Vega is good but the 1080ti is better.

 

[laminutederire]

15 minutes ago, Razor01 said:

 

It may be bad for AMD perf, but it does feel like we may have better performance for AA using some kind of machine learning approach.

9 minutes ago, asus killer said:

 

Well Ryzen is better than coffee make on particular use cases and particular price points. Same could have been argued for Vega if the prices were somewhat normal. And that's what is wrong with techtubers I think.

They focus too much on the high end and promote Nvidia for it, but sometimes fail to put an emphasis on the fact that AMD has compelling options at 1070-1060-1050 level and now at 1070ti level as well, which are the cards that people can actually afford at the end of the day.

(Because when you think about it, you'd be stupid to have a 1080ti with a dual core or weak quad core CPU and a 1080p 60Hz monitor. So the price of the cpu plus the monitor and so on have to be added, and you get something rather expensive that most can't afford. Hence why you'll go for less)

[maartendc]

On 3/8/2018 at 5:04 PM, WMGroomAK said:

Here what John Teeple, Director - Partner Marketing at NVIDIA, has to say about GPP.

Quote

In our latest effort to better serve gamers, we're introducing our GeForce Partner Program.

The GPU and software of a gaming PC make all the difference in a gamer's experience. And together with our add-in card and system partners, we're dedicated to building the best PC gaming platform bar-none -- this is the GeForce promise.

The GeForce Partner Program is designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into the GPU platform and software they're being sold, and can confidently select products that carry the NVIDIA GeForce promise.

This transparency is only possible when NVIDIA brands and partner brands are consistent. So the new program means that we'll be promoting our GPP partner brands across the web, on social media, at events and more. And GPP partners will get early access to our latest innovations, and work closely with our engineering team to bring the newest technologies to gamers.

Partners are signing up, fast. They see the benefit of keeping brands and communication consistent and transparent.

The program isn't exclusive. Partners continue to have the ability to sell and promote products from anyone. Partners choose to sign up for the program, and they can stop participating any time. There's no commitment to make any monetary payments or product discounts for being part of the program.

GPP ensures our engineering and marketing efforts support brands consumers associate with GeForce. That transparency will give gamers the confidence needed to make their purchase, whichever products they choose

...

 

I mean, reading this explanation, I kind of understand where Nvidia is coming from. If they are having events and product launches where they market a "Strix" card or a "Aorus" card or whatever, they then don't want AMD cards out there carrying the same names.

 

However, what is shitty is that instead of just encouraging board partners to change naming, they are shutting out people who don't want to "play along" from all kinds of cooperation and delaying their shipments of GPU's etc.

 

The real solution to this "problem" is Nvidia just marketing their GPU ONLY. So just market GTX 1060, or GTX 1070, not "Strix GTX 1060". What is wrong with that? Any gamer with half a brain knows that GTX 1060 stands for the GPU, and the Strix is the Asus cooler on it.

 

As usual, these kinds of shitty business practices are veiled under the guise of "we don't want to "Confuse" the consumer. They did the same thing with Net neutrality and with the new "Lootbox" labels for the ESRB "we don't want to "CONFUSE" parents with too many "details" on what kind of "in-app purchases" there are in the game.

Meaning: we rather just put "contains in-app-purchases" on everything, so we don't have to be up front about which games will have your kids gambling for lootboxes with mommy's credit card.

[Razor01]

28 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

It may be bad for AMD perf, but it does feel like we may have better performance for AA using some kind of machine learning approach.

 

 

It really wasn't that bad for AMD performance either, actually they suprising really boosted their ROP performance to stay competitive, every now and then we see it hurt them, like with Fiji, but with Vega we don't really see AA hurt too much either, every now and then there are some games that do though, but over all, I think their AA performance is fine.

 

Also now shader based AA is better over all with the rendering techniques used so only using MSAA and of course SSAA are kinda moot.  Better to use shader based and lower amounts of the other two.

[asus killer]

25 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

Well Ryzen is better than coffee make on particular use cases and particular price points. Same could have been argued for Vega if the prices were somewhat normal. And that's what is wrong with techtubers I think.

They focus too much on the high end and promote Nvidia for it, but sometimes fail to put an emphasis on the fact that AMD has compelling options at 1070-1060-1050 level and now at 1070ti level as well, which are the cards that people can actually afford at the end of the day.

(Because when you think about it, you'd be stupid to have a 1080ti with a dual core or weak quad core CPU and a 1080p 60Hz monitor. So the price of the cpu plus the monitor and so on have to be added, and you get something rather expensive that most can't afford. Hence why you'll go for less)

 

Almost all youtubers called the ryzen 1600 the best price/performance cpu, i don't think we can exactly shift the blame to them. But the flagship card or cpu do a lot for the brand, and 8700k or 1080ti are kings and that makes the brand stand out, that's the sense i'm giving to it.

Yotubers (most of them) make almost all videos about high end shit and that's the message that goes to the public.

If this was exactly a pure sense consumer market we wouldn't have rgb crazyness because like linus said it "doesn't increase performance"

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

People actually do that, maybe not for Fiat's though heh. Lots of people brought Quattros, Evos and WRXs because they were really good rally cars, because we need that in town right? Car people lol, not that I'm not guilty of such things when it comes to cars. 

I know it happens (it is why companies participate in these competitions to begin with), it's just I don't understand it. I mean, it's not one of those things you may feel particularly smart for not falling for them  Yet, evidence says, it works...

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I know it happens (it is why companies participate in these competitions to begin with), it's just I don't understand it. I mean, it's not one of those things you may feel particularly smart for not falling for them  Yet, evidence says, it works...

people are dumb.   That's why we have stupid ads that basically tell you they can stave off cancer, fix your job, relieve your arthritis pain all with one magic pill and people fall hand over fist to pay $50 for a bottle of 25 tablets.  The number of "herbal" supplements people pay $100's for stands testimony to how easily led we are as consumers.

[Aethelbert]

Spoiler

 

Looks like it is happening.

 

TL;DR - Good luck getting AORUS or ROG or 'Gaming' branded cards from AMD. 

 

Edit: you can get a 'Gaming box' still. 

[Carclis]

49 minutes ago, Aethelbert said:

Looks like it is happening.

 

TL;DR - Good luck getting AORUS or ROG or 'Gaming' branded cards from AMD. 

Looking at MSI's product listings it would seem that all Radeon cards are now variants of the Armor series which were known to have a poor reputation based on their cooling capability. It's even worse than expected because I believe it uses the same cooler as the Armor too.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Aethelbert said:

  Hide contents

 

Looks like it is happening.

 

TL;DR - Good luck getting AORUS or ROG or 'Gaming' branded cards from AMD. 

 

Edit: you can get a 'Gaming box' still. 

Still on Asus Australian page.  ROG strix rx 570/580 and vega 64 flavors

 

https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/ROG-Republic-of-Gamers-Products/

 

[Notional]

I wonder why NVidia and ALL the vendors are shut close about this retarded program. It's almost as if they have something to hide, huh?

 

Also, here is Gigabytes external GPU box with a 1070:

 

And here is Gigabytes AMD focused external GPU box with a 580:

 

 

Completely identical with one glaring difference: No gaming branding on the AMD version.

 

[mr moose]

Also Gigabyte still selling Aorus  and G1 Gaming branded AMD cards on their website:

https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Graphics-Card/AORUS

[Notional]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

Also Gigabyte still selling Aorus  and G1 Gaming branded AMD cards on their website:

https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Graphics-Card/AORUS

For now.

[LAwLz]

8 minutes ago, Notional said:

Completely identical with one glaring difference: No gaming branding on the AMD version.

Correction, no Auros branding on the AMD one.

From what I've read it seems like the GPP contracts does not prevent manufacturers from using a gaming brand on AMD products. It's that it can't be the same branding as Nvidia products. If that's the case then Gigabyte could have switched it around and given the Auros branding to the AMD card, and the lack of extra branding on the Nvidia card. However, they chose not to. Probably because Gigabyte sells more Nvidia GPUs than AMD ones, and because Nvidia are dominating the high end market, which they want the Auros brand to appeal to.

They could also have put another branding on the AMD box if they wanted to make it more appealing.

 

At the end of the day though, while the situation isn't that great, we're talking about stickers on boxes here. People who care about the stickers are hopefully informed enough to know what they are buying. On the bright side, this will probably lead to AMD and Nvidia products being easier to differentiate, if that's something you care about.