NVIDIA has just announced that it will pull the plug on its GeForce Partner Program (GPP). Although NVIDIA claims that most partners agreed to its program, that they own their brands and GPP didn’t change that, it will end this program. Which, if that was the case, does not make any sense, right?
As NVIDIA stated:
“With GPP, we asked our partners to brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear. The choice of GPU greatly defines a gaming platform. So, the GPU brand should be clearly transparent – no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon.
Most partners agreed. They own their brands and GPP didn’t change that. They decide how they want to convey their product promise to gamers. Still, today we are pulling the plug on GPP to avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we’re doing to bring amazing advances to PC gaming.”
Contrary to NVIDIA’s claims, we do know that ASUS was not able to sell AMD’s graphics cards under the ROG gaming brand and was forced to create the new AREZ brand for them.
But anyway, this feels more like a PR move, especially after AMD’s counter-attack. However, the termination of this program will benefit gamers as manufacturers will be able to sell – once again – AMD’s GPUs under their already established gaming brands. Unless of course AMD goes all out and establishes new brands with the manufacturers, regardless of GPP’s termination.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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AMD fans’ brains are exploding i suppose.
How so? Company gets a ton of bad press for doing something and then stops doing that thing?
Isn’t that just how the world works? It was going to happen sooner or later.
They’re trying to save face after this program resulted in a ton of bad press and got the attention of the FTC and the EU.
It probably was terminated because of both the back lash and the fact that Dell and HP supposedly refused to agree to it, not because Nvidia had a change of heart.
No because as long as business is involved there’ll always be anti consumer practices whether you like it or not, and whether you see it or not, from any company. This is what you people still need to realize.
This is only what we see, for all we know AMD could be 100 times worse, but you might never know, besides, the position of the market is what counts, AMD would do the same douche moves at reversed parts, they already do sh**ty stuff being the “underdog”…
AMD is bad for business.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/35b9f9e1df92487a505b3c4d2114e882b96263dc7cd31ca99109d27dc4780a59.jpg
How fitting that the Apple figure looks the most retarded.
Too funny!
Sent from my iPhoneThat was fast.
It seems this whole GPP program sort of backfired on NVIDIA. I just hope they don’t pull some other similar stunt in near future.
Its seems Dell and HP might also be responsible, for this move from Nvidia, well at least to some extent, if not fully.
Seems logical, in the sense that they also had a lawsuit filed against this whole GPP program.
None of those boxes have either AMD OR NVIDIA ON THEM. They do say Geforce or Radeon though….
There is no NVIDIA logo on the Asus Strix box, only the specifications in small text does it say “powered by NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070”.
What alot of people seem to miss is that AMD users still get ROG, just a different name, zero difference, so AMD users care purely for the ROG brand name more than the GPU itself then? As far as I know, ASUS just renamed it for AMD GPUs, people missed the point that AMD users or the consumer don’t lose out, AREZ STRIX is ROG STRIX.
AMD fans’ brains are exploding i suppose.
**copy/paste spam Bot alert**
You know, now that they’ve terminated the program, it makes me wonder if AMD will now do the same.
I disliked the program from day 1, but I’d dislike it all the more if AMD kept theirs going.
In the eyes of people AMD isn’t doing and saying anything wrong, they’re just perfect, the perfect corporation.
I hope you’re joking… Maybe in the same vane as the joke that is AMD…
Joking about what? How great and holy and righteous AMD is? How could i be joking?????????????
It’s ironic how the fans will do that, just like Sony fans have given crap to anyone else but Sony themselves, and now Sony is back to their arrogant ways.
Well AMD got away with saying VEGA’s RRP is $399 and then say it’s really $499, $399 was just a temp deal price. People who got it for $399 are happy, still cheaper than NVIDIA is the excuse.
Yeah classic AMD. Playing that economy game 24/7.
WAHHH, WAHHHH, I want my Radeon ROG STRIX,I got a AREZ, never heard of this sh*tty ASUS brand……… oh wait, it’s a ROG.
LMAO
Aaaaaaaand it’s gone.
Was anyone actually defending this?
Yes, Nvidia shareholders.
But I’m not aware of any legit tech or gaming site that was defending GPP.
Probably evga since they only sell nvidia gpus
Thank you and i guarantee if youtubers and all of us didn’t freak they would have kept it. Speaking as an 1080 owner this was utter BS
Well it seems like when the internet freaks out about this stuff and i mean from people on all fronts this stuff stops. Same thing with crappy games too haha.
As soon as GPP died , ASUS ROG VEGA 64 ADS started to pop out again.. So much for the nvtardis argument that the GPP does not kill AMD card branding..
But that isn’t AMD’s branding. It’s Asus….
That was stricken from amd gpu-s when gpp was signed and now it came back after gpp is dead.. put two and two together dammit
asus went and created the arez amd branding for nothing
It’s rather a storm in a tea cup anyway, AMD users still get an ASUS ROG just a different name, consumers don’t actually lose anything. It was all about branding and how NVIDIA think it’s more important than AMD.
I’ll give some proof, monitors with G-Sync have “NVIDIA G-Sync” on top left of the monitor, Freesync monitors have “FREESYNC” on top left, proof that NVIDIA think brinding is more important and they’re right to think that as it works with every other company and their brand in full exposure. Nothing like reminding the consumer or others that might see the product who made the tech, it’s powerful marketing.
Not anymore . ROG is back for amd… AREZ will most likely die
What a joke, AREZ is ROG anyway, you all got fooled by a branding war.
We did not , nvidia tried monopolistic BS and got kicked.. the end
Nope, AMD users got ROG, it’s called AREZ.
Oh man AREZ IS DEAD… the end
removed from asus product paige.. dont be stubborn
No difference, you got fooled, it was abotu branding awareness and how NVIDIA put it above AMD.
Oh boy…
Tell me ASUS Radeon ROG and ASUS Radeon AREZ are not the same thing.
OMG you are thick.. One is an established BRAND that nvidia TRIED TO STEAL FROM AMD that started WITH ANN AMD MOTHERBOARD , the other is some unknown entity that was THREE WEEKS OLD.. to the f math yourself
Yeah a brand, nothing more, you get the same quality, same GPU, same features, MAH precious brand, WAAAAAHH.
ASUS GeForce ROG, change the name to ASUS GeForce REX, I’d still buy the f*cking thing it’s the same thing, I’m just not brand elitist pr*ck.
You must be special. Branding is everything for sales.
What would people rather buy? A Ferrari maranello or an Arez that you never heard about?
People will usually buy what they already know, even if a different product might be better.
Kill it with fire. user of 750ti and 1060 but still hate this BS marketing
“Most partners agreed.”
Well ya, that’s the whole point of making an offer they can’t refuse. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/db41ca858fc320ae5d484389eac1900a66b74bbf5fc62c848513ce95e2153ce9.jpg
Yep, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang is like the Michael Corleone of PC gaming and Phil Spencer is a wannabe Vito Corleone.
Gaben is akin to the FBI brandishing the RICO Act or something!
Clean up your act Nvidia. Every empire falls, and most fall due to their arrogance. You’ve lost your way the last few years.
They’re scum and always have been since the beginning. They’ve been anti-consumer and pro illegal monopolistic practices since the 90’s. What this really means is that most people are just immoral in giving money to criminal organizations. Vote with your wallet or you’ll only get what’s coming to you. Support fair and honest competition, which benefits everyone.
except there is no “fair and honest” competitor in this space anymore. play it by the book then you’ll become another Imagination Technologies in the making.
More shocking and interesting tech news for Gamers !
It looks like AMD is prohibiting ASRock from selling its graphics cards in Europe.
According to “Computerbase”, this move seems like a soft ban, because AMD has not yet agreed to sell any ASRock GPUs in the EU, but it can still be obtained if someone pays additional taxes, including the shipping cost.
Seems like a controversial move from AMD.
Read this over here. Translate the page, it’s in German. I’m linking the website below.
who cares about eu?
I guess now AMD CPUs and GPUs will magically stop being stuck in 2013 performance-wise
lol
Lol I was thinking the same thing! 😀
Sorry but you all got fooled by a branding war, Radeon AREZ is ROG, same product, consumers lose nothing, storm in a tea cup and millions fell for it, youtube hardware channels got tons of cash for it all.
]Kyle_Bennett[S] 66 points 4 hours ago
NVIDIA told me I would be cut
off if I published the GPP story. Since I did that, they will not reply
to any of my emails, so I suspect that bridge is burned forever.
AMD is obviously happy over it, as you would expect.
As
for AIBs, we are not into new video card season yet, but I would guess
that it is very possible that NVIDIA will forbid them from sampling
HardOCP with NV GPU cards.
It will be interesting if NVIDIA pushes the AIBs to pull advertising from my site, which I figure will happen too.
So
all in all, it is likely this will put an end to HardOCP, but I knew
that when I published the story. Not crying over spilt milk here, just
discussing the facts around the situation.
Dear site report this please.. This is from the HARD OCP EDITOR that broke the story of the BS GPP..
It’s funny how nVIDIA goes on blaming rumors, conjecture and mistruths when their own transparency claims weren’t met with media outlets after they were asked for more information on the program…
We all knew the program was BS. Even Nvidia fanboys deep down knew the program was BS. I am just glad the BS is over. Nvidia should work on performance upgrades each year then trying to take custom AIB designs for themselves.
Is that the reason so many nVIDIA fanboys were jumping for joy for this POS saying that GPP is one of the best things that have happened?
Yeah, right. No, i believe you. I’m serious. And sarcastic!
Whoa now, stop the yellow journalism presses because we don’t know the whole story here yet.
For example, what if it is the EU that is forcing AMD’s hand here? In that case, the headline should be “EU prevents ASRock from selling its GPUs in Europe”.
Hey, don’t blame me. I just wrote what I read on that website, but you correct as well.
We still don’t know for sure whether it’s the EU acting here, or AMD, so we should take this news with a grain of salt, as of now.
What a disgustingly disingenuous PR statement that is from Nvidia.
This is just business as usual for Nvidia. I don’t know if you had gone to PC gaming in early 2015 when, iirc Guru3D, broke the news about the 970 memory issues. The 970 did have 4 GB VRAM but it was split. The last 0.5 GB ran 7 times slower than the other 3.5 GB. There was no prior word from Nvidia about this. They advertised it as 4 GB. They never tried to inform tech or gaming sites of this issue.
When word got out Nvidia tried to PR their way out of it at first claiming that there was a breakdown in communication between the Engineering Dept and the Marketing Dept. and when that failed they apologized. They ended up getting a class action lawsuit in the USA and settled out of court for a $30 rebate to each 970 owner.
I bought a 970 before that news came out based on the performance from benches on several sites and was well pleased with the card. I was still pleased with the performance after the news broke as well. The news didn’t change any of the previous benches but I still supported anyone that wanted a refund.
The thing with hardware manufacturers is that they will try all kinds of nonsense and if they get away with it then it just encourages more of it so it’s a smart thing to do to hold them accountable.
Indeed. The issue pertaining to the GTX 970 wasn’t that it had split V-RAM but rather that Nvidia seemingly sought to wilfully deceive the public by having made no mention of it in advertising, to the media nor on the (original) product packaging. Hence them having been subsequently shamed into making said financial compensation.
The GPP and, equally so, the nature of their two PR statements thus far since its cancellation seemingly show that Nvidia hasn’t changed at all during these intervening years. Whether it be shafting the consumer by wilful deception or by way of anti-competitive business practices they seemingly never learn.
It would have at least been something if their PR statement had showed a little contrition and had diplomatically implied that they knew they’d screwed up but there’s nothing like that at all. Presumably so as a consequence of advice from their lawyers. Worse still, the given wording comes close to attempting to cast themselves as the wronged party and also the innocent victim. Jesus wept!
Before some imbecile seeks to dismiss me as a ‘hater’ and/or AMD fanboy then I’ll state clearly that my current PC has a Nvidia GPU. After the GPP disgrace and other scummy Nvidia behaviour prior to it then if AMD up their game my next card may well feature an AMD GPU. I’d rather not now buy another Nvidia product but, sadly, for premium GPUs they’ve been the only option in recent times. I’m in no rush to upgrade so here’s hoping that AMD have something great to offer by the time I do.
I still own a GTX 970 card.
It’s the STRIX model from ASUS. Awesome build quality, and it is dead silent, even under full Load, when I cap out the fans 100%.
Never faced any kind of serious stuttering.
I maxed out “Shadow of MORDOR”, because this game uses a lot of VRAM, but there was no serious performance drop, but I had issues with min/max “FrameTimes”, because of how the Maxwell architecture was designed.
Though, I don’t consider “frametimes” a very big parameter to judge any game’s overall performance.
But, what most peeps failed to understand that even if the card had to access the last HALF 0.5GB portion of it’s video memory, it will STILL be much faster than the system’s bus/PCI-E memory, if the system accesses it.
A lot of hiatus was created with this whole 3.5GB debacle though.
It was a very good GPU for 1080p gaming back then and it’s still pretty good today. Yes, even the slow 0.5 GB VRAM was faster than offloading to system RAM. I think Nvidia released in it’s drivers to attempt to not let the textures storing and frame buffer exceed 3.5 GB if possible so that helped.
Shadow of Mordor does use a lot of VRAM. iirc the Texture Pack upgrade recommended requirements according to the Developer called for 6 GB VRAM.
One of the most commonly misunderstood things about cards is that VRAM usage isn’t the same as VRAM needed. It’s fairly common for a game engine to load up VRAM with textures just because the space is available and if the textures might be possibly needed.
That final point is well made. As much as it pains to me to credit CoD games, the last several of them have the option to pre-load assets to V-RAM for those with plenty of it which is a welcome development.
In regards to the “splitting memory” on 970 i don’t think nvidia have any intention to tell the public about it all. To them it is something that consumer does not need to know just like how majority consumer does not need to know how their “TBR” work in maxwell architecture. Even if they were upfront about it majority of consumer would not even understand about. But using weird memory configuratin is not new to nvidia. They have done it since fermi generation with 550Ti. Back then there is no issue for them hence they maybe thought it is none issue with 970 as well (for not telling the public about it). In fact the memory configuration that was done on 970 is superior compared to their old implementation. Hence it is rare to see 970 having issues with games even when VRAM usage exceeding 3.5GB.
I don’t think they had any intention of telling the full truth about the 970 either. It probably seemed unlikely to them that it would ever be known. They knew that they could make the drivers attempt to never go over 3.5 GB in most cases.
There was more to the story than just the deception about the segmented memory though. They also lied about the ROPs claiming that it had 64 ROPs which was true but only 56 of them were functioning so why advertise 64 ROPs in the first place? Because if they said it had 56 ROPs then the 4 GB VRAM would look suspicious. They also lied about the size of the L2 cache.
Looking back on it the MSRP price of $330 should have been a red flag that something wasn’t right. The previous generation 670 was a $400 card.
Honestly i don’t think the price dictate ghat there is something wrong with the card’s spec because performance still the same. From what i heard initially nvidia intend to price the card around $380 but because of few factors like much cheaper manufacturing process it is possible to price them at such price. And back then due to mining crash there is many cheap 290s around (can be had as low as $200). So nvidia can’t price the 970 slightly below brand new 290/290X (that cost around $400) if they really want to attract buyers buying their card. But one thing that i think ruined nvidia initial plan was new generation of console. With new generation console arrive new games starts using a lot of VRAM. I think nvidia miss predict the amount of VRAM usage with 8th gen console.
Actually, I find that statement a bit hilarious !
It seems some NV advocate/PR wrote that in a “Panic Mode”, to counter any last moment Lawsuit, and/or avoid going further into any legal obligation, duh.
Yep, I commented along similar lines re: likely involvement of lawyers in my reply to @64K earlier.
wish gsync backfired.
that massive performance increase is thanks to die shrink. but over the years it become more and more difficult to get. it is something that i would not blame on nvidia or AMD.
Not just more difficult but also lower process node chips are becoming more expensive to make. Probably yields aren’t as good as they used to be either. Take a look at a 1080 Ti GPU. It has around 12 billion transistors. That’s a lot of room for errors to occur and usually the chip can be salvaged and sold as a mid-range chip instead but TSMC charges just the same as if it were a perfect chip. Nvidia buys by the wafer and they don’t know what the yield will be on each wafer.
It’s not getting reported on a lot but look at the problems Intel had with the 10nm process. Delay after delay because yields were a problem.
Sure it’s possible to do a few more die shrinks on silicon but is it cost effective to do so? We are going to hit that wall eventually. I don’t want to turn my comment into a book so I will just skip what I think is going to happen in the coming years.
Those that did not follow tech related stuff will never know this. Nvidia already “voiced” their complaint about increasing price on smaller nodes (thus negating the saving could be had by making the chip smaller) back in 2012. That’s why they need to reduce their dependency on die shrink as a mean to increase performance. Nvidia answer to this is to reworking with the architecture itself. And so far it work quite well for them. This is also what AMD lack with their GPU. Over the years i can see that AMD still try relying heavily on die shrink to increase their performance. But starting with 16nm/14nm even with die shrink it is hard for them to increase their performance. Back in 2015 Fury X is about equal to nvidia 980ti. Right now their fastest only competitive with nvidia mid range chip in majority of games.