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posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 18 2018, @10:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the squabbles dept.

AMD calls out NVIDIA's partner program, G-Sync 'gamer taxes':

A promotional push by NVIDIA has apparently tied up PC builders, and raised the ire of its competitor AMD. The current leader in the graphics card market, NVIDIA has apparently developed a GeForce Partner Program (GPP) that it claims exists 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."

But according to AMD, that vague explanation hides an attempt to elbow competition out of high-profile system lines. A recent report by HardOCP suggests that for PC builders to be a part of the program (with access to combined marketing efforts, bundles and rebate offers) they have to exclusively align their gaming brand with NVIDIA's GeForce hardware (and not AMD's Radeon). Things came to a head yesterday when ASUS suddenly announced a new gaming line, AREZ, that apparently exists only to keep AMD Radeon-powered PCs out of its well-known ROG gaming equipment. With AMD out of the way, the ROG line can join NVIDIA's GPP.

Also at Digital Trends, Tom's Hardware, and Notebookcheck.


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:21PM (#669237) Journal

    It's primarily AMD and Linux...

    I like AMD. Don't get me wrong. I love them. I respect and appreciate their efforts to go out of their way to contribute CPU and GPU drivers and code to the Linux kernel and other free endeavors (even if they do it with nonfree firmware blobs sometimes, and call these blobs "hardware").

    It's not just AMD that I love... I remember being all happy when the NEC V20 and NEC V30 were being used in clone PC XTs, making them faster than their intel-using peers. I cheered for Cyrix, IDT -> VIA, Transmeta, and NexGen. I bought their chips; I have had at least one system built around each, and the systems I've built or bought based on each of these chips outnumber the intel-insides.

    I've built systems with Diamond, S3, 3dfx, ATI, lots of "graphics accelerators" as they used to be known (as well as Nvidia and intel graphics).

    NEC, Cyrix/IDT/VIA, and Transmeta are not major x86 players these days.

    Only AMD, Nvidia and intel are producing graphics chipsets, and intel not so you'd notice.

    AMD bought NexGen and ATI, giving them a solid base to dominate the universe.

    And I want them to!

    My GPU in my current workstation is a Radeon RX 460OC from MSI. Every system I've built for years has gotten a Radeon of one kind or another.

    Radeons aren't the market-leaders in speed--Nvidia can easily wipe up the marketplace with them, and do it so fast they don't even notice the bump. But I want AMD to succeed and I like the Radeons.

    This brings us to my past year's adventure with my bought-at-release Ryzen. It was a source of random segfaults from day 1, which turned out the be a bug in Ryzen chips produced before about week 24 or 25 of 2017 (mine was from week 5). I ended up finally RMA-returning it and getting a replacement (week 37) that worked.

    That Ryzen was from my main workstation--so I built a substitute workstation from junk (a used under-$200 Xeon E5v2 chip from 2013, a $75 Chinese no-name X79 motherboard, some DDR3 RAM as opposed to the nice fast DDR4 that the Ryzen uses) to use during the few weeks I was without my beloved Ryzen. (Literally from junk; the case for this build came from a trash pile in my apartment complex.)

    Guess what? The junk Xeon is faster than the shiny recent Ryzen. Faster at handbrake, faster at compiling, faster at benchmarks, faster Passmark scores, and that's with its hands tied behind its back by an ancient X79 chipset.

    When I got the Ryzen back I gave it to my son; it replaced his AMD FX 8300. I kept the faster-but-junk Xeon system.

    Nvidia is being sleazy here, like Microsoft and intel before it.

    But AMD needs to step up their game. Because I want them to dominate, I really do.

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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday April 30 2018, @02:53PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 30 2018, @02:53PM (#673752)

    If that Xeon is better than your Ryzen then that Xeon is also better than Intel's best i7. Old Xeon's are still really expensive. Depending on which one you have it might still be more expensive than the latest consumer CPU from both AMD and Intel.

    --
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