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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NVIDIA Terminates GeForce Partner Program
Just as quickly as it came into being, NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program has come to an end.
In a short article posted to their website today, NVIDIA's Director of Product Marketing, John Teeple, announced that the program has been cancelled. In making the unexpected decision, Teeple stated "The rumors, conjecture and mistruths go far beyond its [the GeForce Partner Program's] intent. Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program" and that "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." No further information was provided on just what canceled entails, and what this means for existing program partners.
NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program is been [sic] divisive, to put it lightly. After news of it broke in March and was confirmed by NVIDIA, the program quickly attracted a good deal of negative attention out of concerns over what it meant for the competitive market, and a general degree of mean spiritedness. Adding fuel to the fire, few details of the program were ever confirmed by NVIDIA – with the company seeing little benefit in doing so – which left a great void open for rumors and unsourced reports of all kinds.
Also at PCWorld.
Previously: AMD Blasts Nvidia Over GeForce Partner Program, G-Sync
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:14PM (2 children)
I have been quite disappointed with new startups these days who all seem to be more than happy to adopt the concept of "Be evil now, ask forgiveness later when you are big enough to have good lawyers" but seriously, when was that an open invitation to all the other companies to follow suit and copycat each other in a damned race to the bottom.
Get to the top of the market by having an awesome product. Get there by having great support. Get there by having a cheaper or better value-for-money product.
*Bring bring.... bring bring...* Hello? Anti-trust, yes good, I think there's a case for you here. Have a look at your old pal NVidia. Good day. *click...*
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Spamalope on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)
It seems similar to Intel's processor lockout plans in the past. I wonder if Nvidia is taking a page directly from that playbook intentionally.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:31AM
Actually I was reminded to Microsoft's past tactics … well, let's just call it the evil tactics of dominant market players.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:36PM (4 children)
Seriously, I haven't heard such nonsense in a long time.
They are just about the worst chip manufacture out there when it comes to transparency and openness.
The only thing transparent about this announcement is its ultimate intent.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:47AM (3 children)
I guess it depends on what platform you're using. On Linux, you won't find a better combination of open community involvement, open source drivers (with documentation), and performant hardware. When you looking at all of those things, nVidia is straight up garbage comparatively... That's not even getting into nVidia's shady business practices like GPP. AMD's response is over the top and sanctimonious. However, I can't fault AMD too much considering nVidia's slimy behavior. While AMD is far from being an angel, they aren't even in the same zip code as nVidia and Intel when it comes to sleaziness.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:35AM (1 child)
I'm confused. At first, you seem to contradict the post you replied to, only to then basically say the same as that post: nVidia is the opposite of open.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:44PM
the op just didn't write/edit it properly. the second point was the valid one.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:46AM
Linux creator Linus Torvalds: Nvidia, the single worst company the Linux developer community has ever dealt with.
-- https://www.wired.com/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia-linux/ [wired.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:47PM (7 children)
It's an anti competitive move. It doesn't help gamers at all. That being said, i can't find a liquid cooled AMD Vega 64 for a decent price anywhere. Don't think i ever will : / 1,200$ for a high end liquid cooled card is 400$ too much (1080Ti and Vega both).
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:56PM (6 children)
And you can blame the cryptocash-thirsty miners for that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:13AM (3 children)
They (all of the manufacturers) seem to have been caught flat footed on the demand, either that or its the old artificial scarcity ploy all over again.
That Ploy always ends when someone else enters the market, maybe samsung, or someone else, with a chip custom tailored to miners at a quarter of the price. Then there will be a fire sale.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:24AM
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/samsung-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-mining-chips/index.html [cnn.com]
"[Samsung] is well positioned to capitalize on growing demand for them. It just passed Intel (INTC) to become the world's largest chipmaker by revenue."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mth on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:07AM
The cryptocurrency market is very volatile and semiconductor manufacturing lines are really expensive. That's not a combination that makes it worthwhile investing in extra production capacity.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday April 19 2018, @03:00PM
Artificial scarcity at work. The same reason why the price per Gb of hard drives has been flat for a decade now. Capacity is increasing but costs are not decreasing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:21AM
Don't blame me - I use an ASIC rig.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:55PM
no, you can blame these completely incompetent chip makers. we're at conspiracy levels of unresponsiveness here and you want to blame the buyers? get outta heah!
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:39AM (3 children)
The last time I bought a specialized video card it was Radeon based. They seemed to perform the same but to my eye had better brighter colors. The driver system was always more effort than NVidias, at least at that time. It has been many years since I used anything but a native chipset, or gamed in any serious way either.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)
What is a native chipset?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:55PM
In this context, I would say it refers to integrated-and-underpowered graphics circuitry, as opposed to an optional-extra discrete gpu with some horsepower to it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by archfeld on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:15PM
I was meaning the onboard graphics chipset, in my case it is an intel something or other. Grossly underpowered but functional. As I said it has been a long time since I played any sort of modern game. I do miss the days of hours of gaming fun, I started playing muds, I was online in the world of Norath before they added a graphical front end to it and called it EverQuest. I played Dark ages of Camelot, EQ2, WoW, Heretic 2 was a favorite of mine, and I played the original Unreal Tournament on a very good team sponsored by Digital Extremes. I remember the days of LAN parties, and the Bay Area Network Gaming Group. The last real online/fps game I played was Battlefield2, though I dabbled in the Star wars online games, and Rift as well.
The last performance machine I had was an H2O cooled AMD Opteron with a Radeon 9700 graphics card and that was a long time ago. It is hell getting old and other things had to come first.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:59PM (2 children)
Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft. They are all the same in that they can't stay on top by simply being better. Actually they probably can stay on top, but they still have to take the low road with shenanigans. They have more in common than that, but I'll keep it focused to this topic.
It's primarily AMD and Linux for me.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday April 30 2018, @02:53PM
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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