Earlier this month, HardOCP published a really interesting story about NVIDIA’s GPP program. According to HardOCP’s sources, this program prohibited – among other things – third-party GPU manufacturers to use their gaming brand label on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. And even though some claimed that this was merely a rumour, today we’ve discovered some third-party manufacturers – that create GPUs for both companies – who have already removed their gaming brand label from their AMD graphics cards.
As HardOCP revealed:
“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.”
Gigabyte is the first company that is currently removing its gaming brand label from its AMD products. The team has introduced a new AMD-oriented external GPU box, however, the AMD box has your typical GIGABYTE brand. On the other hand, the exact same NVIDIA-oriented box has the AORUS branding.
MSI has also removed all its AMD ‘gaming’ GPUs from its official website. For example, AMD’s RX580 GPUs are only under the ‘Armor’ brand and some gamers had an awful experience with MSI’s ‘Armor’ products in general (meaning that some customers may not even bother with these GPUs solely due to their ‘Armor’ branding).
For what it’s worth, it appears that ASUS is still selling its AMD graphics cards under its ROG Strix gaming label, though it will be interesting to see whether ASUS will remove its ROG branding in the future like Gigabyte and MSI have already done!
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.”
Contact: Email
Oh boy I see a anti trust law suit incoming plus FTC involvement very soon.
If this continues , oh boy will Intel and AMD go after nvidia
But you said Intel hired CTS-Labs to spread fake Ryzen security flaws.
Well, on the Gigabyte pictures You provided, there is no Aorus branding, but bellow it clearly say 580 GAMIN…and it’s obstructed by the other pic. So what could that word be? 😀
The major removal is the Aorus brand (and not just words) from Gigabyte. For example, Gigabyte still sells “Radeon Vega 64 Gaming” but the Aorus ‘gaming’ brand label looks to be exclusive to the NVIDIA GPUs (for future products. That wasn’t the case before).
No it’s not.
wccftech . com/no-amd-rx-vega-custom-models-from-gigabyte-msi/
Gotta love that corporate muscle flexing. Nvidia can go f**k themselves.
Never thought I’d say this, but Intel needs to enter the discrete GPU market ASAP. Nvidia has a monopoly in all but name, and they’re not even trying to hide that fact.
66/33 is the ratio m but yeah intel is also affected by this
They tried in the 90’s and didn’t go so well. How about AMD steps up their game to actually compete at the high end?
high end is not the issue here
Yeah, just AMD in general. HYPE TRAIN and falling flat.
nope.. this is a program that is illegal.. it has nothing to do with amd.. intel is also affected
My comment is regarding INTEL NEEDS TO MAKE A DISCRETE GPU ASAP.
I love all the lawyers on this site. How much do you charge for your services?
this is not short term for nvidia
How Ironic, people want Intel to be the white knight now, LOL
Yep and nothing white about them either. Intel, Nvidia, and AMD have all done and still do shady things. Nvidia is just the flavor of the moment.
Taking the fact that it only affects names I don’t think its illegal. Intel gave money to OEMs to outright not offer, or offer with limited advertising, AMD products. That was illegal anti-competitive behavior.
Nvidia is merely taking the naming conventions synonymous with each brands gaming products and forcing their hand to give it exclusively to Nvidia products with threats of not providing the benefits normally allotted. Since its only in name, this is likely perfectly legal. Huang isn’t stupid by any means, and they have a team of lawyers that they likely got the OK from before engaging in the GPP program. Its unethical, but certainly not illegal.
it is in in fact illegal.. check hard ocp article on GPP and what it does to the aib if not signed
Yes, you lose some “VIP” perks. But what makes this more illegal than any other program that offers similar perks? They aren’t outright giving money to these OEMs, they are not stating to stop selling the competition and what losses to AMD can be guaranteed from this move? Intel outright paid OEM’s to stop selling, or limit the advertising of, AMD products and set the precedent. Although this smells of the same sabotage attempt, its obvious they looked over what happened in that period and found ways to go about it legally. I wouldn’t be surprised int eh slightest if they’re on the line of anti-competitive practices, but scaled back enough to keep it legal.
AIB’s are not required to join, giving them the ability to choose whether or not to join. AIB’s are not required to drop Radeon in order to join, giving AIB’s the ability to still sell competitors wares. AIB’s seem to merely have to drop the current nomenclatures oriented to gaming brands to solely Nvidia products, with it yet to be seen if they’re able to make one directly for radeon. It might be unethical, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its illegal. I’m still waiting for someone to show me what makes it illegal that Nvidia’s army of lawyers missed.
some.. try 14 of them out of 16… sorry there is no way around it.. illegal
Fair enough, which anti-competitive law does it break, in the region of your choice, that states a business that is not forcing their partners to stop selling their competitors wares to not provide all benefits they’d provide those that join one of their programs?
Another AMD hater, what a surprise.
Another AMD fanboy that can’t admit AMD is having a hard time competing. What a surprise.
All aboard hypehypehypehypehypehypehype hyyyyyyypppeeee
It will take AMD much time to regain lost ground. Current market share trends show AMD gaining, however its including much of the mining cards. When it comes to getting into the hands of gamers its a whole nother story. It’ll be till 2019 at the earliest that we’ll see a new card, with 2020 having a new uArch to finally see a replacement to the aging GCN architecture. This does not guarantee availability to the masses unless AMD can create a sustainable product that has a focus on mining that will deter from mass purchases of gaming oriented GPU’s. Seeing that compute hasn’t taken off as much as AMD had hoped, I hope that we’ll see a fork of gaming oriented “next-gen” uArch cards and GCN forked cards (navi successor? ) aimed at AI/ML and Blockchain. Although I know its a far cry from whats affordable on AMD’s part.
Its funny how f/ck1ng Nvidia drones are trying to distort things. We are talking about shady marketing practices but you take this to your stupid benchmark wars.
I would also like to see Intel compete in the discrete GPU market but even more I would like to see them build a fab and make their own GPUs. It’s probably the only way the GPU chip shortages are going to end if mining remains profitable year after year. Of course that wouldn’t happen quickly as fabs are very expensive and take a lot of time to build.
It sad that even with this BS they continue to pull we have little choice but to support them. I’ll settle for anyone to compete with them. Broadcom, Qualcomm Hell I’ll take Western Digital at this point. Just anyone to step up.
NVIDIA do not have a monopoly in the market, if they do please define it. AMD can sell their GPUs in all the same places and compete, they have their own brands that sell exclusively AMD cards only.
Stop with the CommonSense
Tell me how it that works, when Intel tried to monopolize CPUs market in Europe with some shady marketing that forced some big computer stores just to sell intel CPUs.
What we need is “Capitalists” to respect capitalism and stop forcing third parties to do this or that, the only thing they can demand is quality but not removing brands or something like that.
Nvidia why do you have to push this anti consumer crap its not like you even have competition? Making me want to sell my gsync monitor and go with AMD
nvidia lost market share and now it is going all out
Isn’t that what ALL corporations do? Doesn’t matter if they lose .1% or 100%.
it is illegal
We’ll see. Do you know what these manufacturers signed becoming a partner with Nvidia? Neither do I.
read hard ocp article about it
I did and there is still alot of guessing in that article, very little is concrete informaiton. Giving a theorhetical example such as ASUS ROG does mean anything. Do partners have to be part of the program, nope. At this time there is nothing more than legal speculation. So dont’ be part of GPP and just move to manufaturing AMD cards only. Wouldn’t that hurt Nvida? Same as if Nvidia holding back GPU supplies to non GPP partners; it would hurt Nvidia.
Regardless of transparency, any company is still going to have NDA’s around certain things. So of course people can’t discuss certain aspect.
More to come I am sure.
he has the documents in his hands…
Documents in hand, yet lots of speculation and making up examples of what they think it means.
Nooo , black and white.. there is a topic on hard ocp called do not talk about gpp. Check it
“We would not be surprised to see regulators in the US, Europe, and Asia want to take a closer look at GPP as well.”
No, it’s their opinion.
To the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and increasingly so Google it seems that anything short of total domination and control of a given marketplace is unacceptable to them. Having most of something isn’t good enough for them when they believe they can have it all. The end seems to justify the means, in their view.
this is ridiculous, and probably illegal.
get your sh*t togeder AMD and make some good GPUS
that has nothing to do with it
That has EVERYTHING to do with it actually…
nope… because the market decides if a product is good ro bad and in this crypto market all AMD products are good.. it does not matter who has the most fps
That’s why the cryptomarket doesn’t matter and should fkin disappear.
This needs to happen yesterday.
O but it does and it is not going away… it is a pivotal part of the market now..jpr is expecting that q1 2018 could be the biggest gpu sale quarter in years
That’s exactly why nvidia try to sell only their products as a gaming stuff, amd gpus better to sell as mining brand not gaming!
RX VEGAS was garbage. And this is coming from an AMD fan.
Why are you pointing out the obvious? It’s no AMD fan matter, if you say they’re somewhat good then you’re just plain retarded or in denial, so well…
WOW did you actually take that as a personal attack LOL?
Read properly pls. I was actually supporting your point.
Oh sorry didn’t mean to sound harsh, i was just saying that’s obvious, there’s no need to point that out, i’m sorry if you took that as an attack or a response to an attack, i never meant to.
Get your 5h-t together and use your mind for once, how you can say this is about GPU performance, when it is a shady marketing practice.
And the funny thing is how “capitalists” are agree with this. With capitalists like sir Dank i prefer to go communist, at least they arent a bunch of hypocrites who support companies who does these kind of shady stuff.
You know it’s shady to be member of AMD Advocate Program and talk about hypocrisy.
babeltechreviews . com/community/showthread.php?tid=659
Don’t talk about such things. This is about bashing Nvidia.
Wow, that’s an extreeme case without thinking things through. Why not be against bad capitalist companies instead of changing your whole Ideology just because of some bad captalists?
Butt hurt fanboy already.
Simple solution, don’t buy anything. If it’s a corporation the only thing cared about is money and making more money. Sorry to tell you but AMD doesn’t care about you, neither does Nvidia, neither does Intel, nor Tesla, nor Google, nor Cisco nor nor nor.
Again get up in arms about things you do not have the 100% picture about. What have the partners signed? When you are presiding over the case you can make your judgement.
Fascinating article at HardOCP there. One of its key statements perhaps being,
“There is no doubt that NVIDIA GPP has some striking similarities to what Intel has done in the past that has been deemed “anticompetitive conduct” by the Federal Trade Commision. We would not be surprised to see regulators in the US, Europe, and Asia want to take a closer look at GPP as well.”
Although its reminiscent, its not exactly the same. Money exchanged hands to outright not offer AMD products. This is merely securing the gaming name conventions to only Nvidia products when it comes to GPU’s. Its more than likely perfectly legal.
Indeed it’s not the exact same thing as what Intel did but I’m not sure that the Federal Trade Commission and/or European competition authorities would share your optimistic appraisal of Nvidia’s conduct.
“Prey for the Gods changes name to avoid fight with Bethesda’s Prey”
“Hellhunter renamed to HellSign due to Rebellion trademarking the phrase “hell Hunter””
What did Federal Trade Commission and/or European competition authorities said?
Abuses, flagrant or otherwise, of trademark legislation is hardly the same thing as the matter in hand.
So it’s not illegal if AMD is not involved. ok
You’re welcome to believe whatever you want to believe. Your chosen username would suggest as much.
” All too predictably, the internet isn’t short of armchair legal experts telling people what’s what.”
You mean like folks decrying this as illegal actions from a multi-billion dollar company that pays more in a single lawyers yearly salary than what most make in a decade? Not to mention one of the largest reason folks did not want ISP’s to go back under FTC’s regulation is because they’re underfunded and overburdened with the amount of work they are already doing. When do you think the FTC will have time to review, and report that Nvidia’s actions are illegal in your expert opinion?
That, too. Unlike yourself and the others you’ve since referenced without name, I haven’t arrogantly and/or misguidedly professed to know it all and offer an instant legal judgement when not in a position to do so. Nice try at diversionary tactics there.
I asked you a direct question in response to your criticism of my guestimation seeing that you labeled it as a “armchair legal expert telling people what’s what”. Even though you try and label “more than likely legal” as an absolute. If you cannot answer the question while simultaneously calling a guestimation absolute legal advice, why would you even bother replying when you couldn’t even state what exactly was illegal about the GPP and the AIB’s decision to only allocate gaming related brands to Nvidia products while still selling AMD? If Nvidia’s lawyers couldn’t learn from the precedence set by Intel’s actions in the mid 2000’s, what did you find that makes it illegal that they missed?
lol nvidia essentially trademarking the word “gamer” and “gaming”
what scumbags
Imbecile click on first picture and read. I’ll help you RX 580 GAMIN… What letter is missing? ?
The Nvidia GTX 580? Oh the AMD card… That name is too close to the RX 580. Nvidia should sue.
How is this any different to AMD only brands like Sapphire, Powercolor and XFX?
The difference is that these are not brands, they are companies. Also, they chose to work with AMD. What Nvidia is doing is basically stopping Asus (that works in partnership with both Nvidia and AMD), to sell their products under an unified brand. It won’t be able to sell it’s AMD’s GPUs under the name Strix, which is their gaming brand.
Seems like Monopolist tactics to me then.
Yeah for some reason I didn’t get the “brand” thing, then realised the difference. NVIDIA are trying to stop ASUS from selling the ROG brand for AMD cards.
Nvidia shekels at work…
personally i really don’t give a damn about AMD but all this bad rep Intenl/Nvidia is generating for AMD makes me think they’re up to something devious…
I don’t think this is going to turn out to be illegal for Nvidia. They aren’t forcing ASUS to do anything really. They are telling them that if they want to continue using the ROG name on AMD cards then Nvidia will no longer supply them with Nvidia GPUs. I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure that Nvidia has a legal right to not sale to anyone that they don’t want to.
ASUS and Gigabyte are choosing to go along with this probably because it will hurt their bottom line more to drop Nvidia GPUs than to snub AMD.
But this is a sh*tty thing for Nvidia to do imo.
I was just addressing the legality of what Nvidia is doing. Here in the USA you can refuse to do business with a company but it can’t be for race, religious, age, sex. There are laws concerning discrimination. I could be wrong about this. If Nvidia turns out to be breaking any laws then certainly we will here about the lawsuits in the near future.
It sounds sketchy tbh, because not only are they using their “I won’t sell” excuse, but they are also using it to directly affect their competition, all without AMD having a say.
It’s almost akin to MS’s EEE strategy, only Nvidia isn’t trying to buy out all the competition.
“”They steal so I can steal too” that is your logic.
We got the message, Nvidia fanboys see this with good eyes because fanboy ism.
I’ll leave this here.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/73af7be68d366c83d3e9231929843d1a3cafa7876d05cbb909b3e1606a10cca4.png
Yeah that’s what I said and what does stealing have to do with anything?
My point is this happens all the time and to the degree of your game has a similar name to ours in the case of Prey. So people are up in arms that Nvidia doesn’t want the word gaming listed on AMD cards produced by their partners.
Tell me Mr. Lawyer what do the agreements that all the partners signed have to say about this? Exactly we don’t know. Be up in arms all you want, the courts may or may not weigh in on this.
Fanboy calling the kettle black.
If I come here and I said “healthcare for all”, I would see my email getting flooded with disqus notifications with “Capitalist” replying me how my “communist” idea will carry countries to starving. But let see the same “capitalist” being agree with Nvidia forcing third parties to rebrand their products, monopolizing the word “gaming” only for the hardware which use NVIDIA GPUs…
Then some idiots sharing Benchmarking videos, if NVIDIA is that good, why they need to use these kind of tactics? I dont get it.
Capitalism is where you compete with good products and a range of prices, not removing the word “gaming” from your competitor products.
I agree with you in all, at least this one post you made. But don’t forget that nothing is actually confirmed, as of now i found no trace of this on other websites, not even tech ones, please link it if you feel i missed something
Msi literally removed all references of gaming off all amd’s cards but left them in nvidia’s just check waybackmachine.
Yeah i read that too, but nothing is confirmed just yet!
Respectfully don’t “leave” anything from Polygon here! Keep it with you and then dispose of it at the soonest opportunity.
Yeah, because DSO is far better than those other sites.
“DSO is far better”
Correct. You’re learning already. Well done.
The sarcasm is strong with this one.
Here is DSO article.
Bethesda/Zenimax forced Prey for the Gods to change its name due to trademark opposition
dsogaming . com/news/bethesdazenimax-forced-prey-for-the-gods-to-change-its-name-due-to-trademark-opposition/
Bethesda/Zenimax forced them. It should be illegal. But why we haven’t heard any news about Bethesda games boycott? Oh right, Bethesda and AMD are partners.
Funny, you should read some comments about this site. You’d think it’s run by the Trump family.
Well, 60 million people voted for him so it’s not unreasonable this site would have Trump supporters and there is nothing wrong with that unless you believe the left wing media of course, who are still having melt downs about it.
You mean the all 8 years when Obama was in office melt downs? New Pres in office and still having melt downs over Hill and Obama?
TBH I was not happy with any of the candidates. Shaking up DC is great, but not when you drain a swamp to fill it with sewage.
Ah, the Cathy Newman response. gg
Are Hill or Obama in office now?
Are Hill or Obama in office now?
We’re still feeling the effects of their “service.”
If you want to say that then we can say Bush and Reagan as well?
Unfortunately, Reagan’s work has been undone by decades of Democrats and RINOs. We are still living with 43’s “Islam is a great world religion of peace” nonsense.
So you’re saying he’s a lobster or not? :p
Too funny!
Not even in the same league as when Trump Won, the left wing media, UK left wing media is totally biased against Trump and has been since he ran. If you look at the intervews he did in the 90s when they were asking him about running for president, they were actually positive about him running, he had the same ideas and things he was fed up with about America.
Also Obama, Hiliary voted for the fence act 2006 and then 2 years later voted against, just happened that Obama was starting to run for President, so yeah they both wanted what Trump wants ,except they have a different agenda now like the democrats, that agenda is probably to bring illegals in to vote for them, maybe they realised that in the 90s.
IGN? 🙂
MSN?
Fox News?
AMD Hardware Justice Warriors right now.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e6b8f99ef1106ee48d959a6a4d9e651f07b8c868b641130388ede5adf470069.png
It’s a good thing we’re not all locked in a room together right now or someone would surely have been stabbed by now : )
Fanboys like these thankfully aren’t trusted with dangerous objects by their mummy and daddy or appointed mental healthcare specialist.
We’d need a third big boy to spice things up a notch!
This is mainly for Blender and other applications and not for gaming.
Indeed, but sadly they are the best Gpu’s!!!
What the is this all about???
But MSI Armor coexists in both AMD & NV cards.
Man f’k Nvidia so hard seriously.
I wonder if this crypto currency thing is sustainable for them in the long run.
Is there any half decent competitor for GPU’s? I like NVidia cards but it’s like buying from the devil at this point.
its better expect for some douchy comments 😛
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