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NVIDIA Apologizes, 'Walks Back' Threat to Withhold GPUs From Reviewer (techspot.com) 111

Posted by EditorDavid from the what-a-card dept.
This week NVIDIA threatened to stop providing GeForce Founders Edition review units to reviewer Steven Walton, who runs the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (and is also an editor/reviewer at TechSpot). NVIDIA had complained "your GPU reviews and recommendations have continued to focus singularly on rasterization performance, and you have largely discounted all of the other technologies we offer gamers. It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do."

NVIDIA's email to Walton had said that henceforward their review products would instead be allocated to other media outlets "that recognize the changing landscape of gaming and the features that are important to gamers and anyone buying a GPU today, be it for gaming, content creation, or studio and stream."

But TechSpot reports tonight that "Less than 48 hours later, Steve received the good news. Nvidia apologized and walked everything back." Great news indeed, but let's be clear this wouldn't have happened if not for the support of the community at large and key people in the tech space that have such an enormous influence that it was too much for Nvidia to ignore. Linus from LinusTechTips (his angry rant on the WAN Show embedded above is pure gold) and Steve from Gamers Nexus, were two of those persons.
And unfortunately, by then TechSpot had already composed a scathing takedown of NVIDIA's email: As a corporation, it's Nvidia's prerogative to decide on the reviewers it chooses to collaborate with. However, this and other related incidents raise serious questions around journalistic independence and what they are expecting of reviewers when they are sent products for an unbiased opinion...

In today's dynamic graphics hardware space, with 350W flagships, hardware ray tracing, and exotic cooling solutions, there's a wide range of data points Hardware Unboxed looks at. But at the end of the day, there's only one real question every GPU buyer wants to know: how well do games run on a particular piece of hardware? Considering that 99% percent of Steam games feature raster-only rendering pipelines, rasterization performance was, is, and will be, a key point that Steve considers in GPU reviews...

[M]ost games (including almost all RTX titles) are built on raster renderers. A hypothetical graphics card with most of its die space reserved for ray tracing would run Quake II RTX great and... not much else. Ray tracing absolutely deserves a place in modern GPU reviews. But there's simply not enough of it in enough games for any responsible reviewer to put it center-stage, in place of raster performance. It wouldn't do justice to consumers, who will primarily be running raster workloads. This is why Nvidia's complaint is so puzzling.
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NVIDIA Apologizes, 'Walks Back' Threat to Withhold GPUs From Reviewer More

NVIDIA Apologizes, 'Walks Back' Threat to Withhold GPUs From Reviewer

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  • What will it be like to be an ARM licensee? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13, 2020 @12:53AM (#60824638)

    Who ever is in charge of deal making over there at NVIDIA seems to be in over their head. I feel sorry for all the ARM licensees that are going to have to put up with NVIDIA going forward...

    • That isn't the way these licenses work. They don't have changeable terms. It is just an instruction set, you're not going to put the engineering into an implementation if you have to get ongoing permission to use your work. Instead you get a license, and if they feel whiny, they can cry if they want.

    • Who ever is in charge of deal making over there at NVIDIA seems to be in over their head. I feel sorry for all the ARM licensees that are going to have to put up with NVIDIA going forward...

      It won't be any different from any other company. This entire industry is toxic in this ways. I think Gamers Nexus even did a video where they said they've been black listed by everyone at some point or another. Der8auer did a video on Intel threatening to blacklist him ironically on a video where the comments accused him of shilling for Intel.

      Dealing with these companies on a professional level must just be an exercise of going in with a handful of candy to keep all these children happy.

    • Certainly. Either the guy has little influence, in which case who cares, or the guy has substantial influence, in which case who wants to piss him off. Should be a no-brainer (probably the second name of the Nvidia's official making that decission)

  • Linus' rant is epic (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @01:22AM (#60824680)
    Definitively worth the time to watch.

    • tantrum
      now that NVIDIA controls ARM they have this Finnish boi over a barrel

    • A whole hour and twenty minutes? No rant is that epic.

      • rant is the first 40 minutes - and yes, it IS that epic :)

        • This convinced me to watch, and I got through much of it - thank you!

          I am glad that he went through the letter like that. However, it's also kind of painful to watch, because obviously the letter was not written for the reviewer, but instead written for the global audience that Nvidia knew the letter would be released to. That doesn't diminish Linus's "rant" at all - but it's sad that this global audience for the most part wouldn't see that it's just a giant turdburger of propaganda.

          That was entertaining an

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ytene ( 4376651 )
            The letter was absolutely written to be leaked, just as Linus' points out, because it's written to be full of marketiing rubbish.

            The fact that it was written as a not-very-well-hidden dog-whistle threat *and* that nVidia *expected* it to be leaked, which means that their attitude to that was one great big "F You" means that they deserve to experience all kinds of hurt.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sebby ( 238625 )

        A whole hour and twenty minutes? No rant is that epic.

        And yet people attend Trump rallies...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DeBaas ( 470886 )

      most of us here praising a rant from Linus on Nvidia. Just like the good old days.

    • Definitively worth the time to watch.

      Yeah except his voice and intonation makes me want to jab a screwdriver in my eardrum. Nothing personally against him, I just can't listen to him. Expect an epic rant from Gamers Nexus coming up too :-)

  • They pull this shit periodically (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday December 13, 2020 @01:32AM (#60824694) Homepage Journal

    And people keep forgiving them.

    I've stuck with nvidia for years but now that AMD has drivers that work most of the time, it's reasonable to switch.

    • now that AMD has drivers that work most of the time,

      That's good to know.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And people keep forgiving them.

      I have not. As a consequence I have been using AMD graphics for a long time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      eh

      getting driver restart every one or two hours, whether idle or under load

    • Except that I am losing about 10-20% of performance converting my CUDA code to OpenCL due to the shear lack of registers (about half from CUDA). And that Tensorflow is CUDA only (Don't make me laught talking about ROCm who still doesn't support recent core (Navi, Big Navi) and floting point operations last time I checked).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      You can hate a company and still use their product. That's not the same as forgiving them.

      I for example also hate that I'm pretty much locked into nVidia products for doing digital art.
      But giving up CUDA (and soon OptiX) for AMD's OpenCL would hurt the workflow in a way hurts myself.
      So I begrudgingly buy nVidia for what's equivalent to thousands of dollar, hoping that AMD will get their shit together for digital art software support and become a competitor.

    • And people keep forgiving them.

      If you don't forgive them then you are probably still using an AMD K6 from a bygone era. All the companies periodically pull stupid shit like this. There's not a single chip vendor, and not a single hardware packager (I'm sure there's an industry term to describe Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc, I'm just drawing a blank), that hasn't had their name dragged through the mud for stupid shit like this.

      Hell Gamers Nexus seems to call out some company doing some stupid shit in this industry on an almost weekly basis.

    • And people keep forgiving them.

      Because all these companies do dodgy shit, you're incredibly naive if you think there's any of these big corporations that doesn't have shady stuff going on. So just buy the best technology available at the time, there's no value in brand loyalty anyway.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I'll propose another view: let's not focus on how long it took to get to the party, but be glad we arrived at all? Thanks, AMD, for pointing out this thing that can be turned on in order to make good hardware just a bit better.

        Yes, Nvidia are asshats to only enable this for their latest products. But we kind of already knew they were that kind of asshole. AMD is kind of the same kind of asshole for it only being available on their latest CPU and GPU products in combination.

  • The real Linus vs NVIDIA rant (Score:5, Funny)

    by doragasu ( 2717547 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @02:52AM (#60824786)

    Epic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Because to me, that indeed looks like bad reviewing.
    But the reactions imply there's more to it.

    Anyone here who can TL;DR his reasons for us?

    • Re:Wait, do why did he focus on rasterization? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Computershack ( 1143409 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @04:04AM (#60824876)
      He focussed on rasterisation because he did a completely separate video that focussed on DLSS and Raytracing which was linked from the review.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      For one, RTRT, as it is right now, is still mostly useless.
      Performance wise, it is only somewhat worthwhile if you're using an RTX 3090, which you won't get under 1699€ in Europe.

      You can find the same sentiment from pretty much all of the major computer hardware reviews, that while RTRT is a really nice idea, it often doesn't make that much of a difference considering the impact on performance, that ruins the frame rates. On top of that there's also only a very small number of games that even suppor

      • If you build yourself a PC around real time ray tracing for gaming right now, you're a moron.

        Couldn't have said it better myself.

    • Why is it bad reviewing to focus on the vast majority of games? While real time ray tracing is a promising new technology, there are not a lot of games right now that use it. In a few years from now when more games use RT, the vast majority of older games will not magically use it unless developers want to go back and re-release games.

      Having watched the reviews, their main point was, yes it's cool but it is still early in adoption by the game industry. Also to take advantage in this generation you have to h

  • Nvidia are delusional (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @03:43AM (#60824850)
    If I turn on ray tracing in Cyberpunk with a 3090, which don't even exist on this planet at the moment it would seem, the game STILL would run at about 30 FPS on my 1440p 144Hz monitor. We're a decade out from ray tracing from being possible efficiently in realtime. Gamers know this. Reviewers know this. Stop lying and pretending it's an option anyone should turn on under any circumstances.

    • If you have a 30XX serie video card, activate DLSS right now as Steve said in one of its video about RTX games.

    • We're a decade out from ray tracing from being possible efficiently in realtime.

      Don't be stupid. Just because you have an edge case in front of you in the form of a ludicrously beautiful next gen game doesn't mean we're "decades out", especially since there are 20 other raytracing titles out there which work perfectly fine for realtime gameplay. Are you going to get 144fps? Unlikely. Is it playable to even a good degree? Absolutely

      It also sounds like you turned on raytracing without turning on DLSS. You realise there is a reason both features were introduced at the same time right? Ben

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Resuna ( 6191186 )

      Real-time raytracing running actual games was demonstrated by Phillip Slusallek in 2004, using about the transisor budget of a Rage Pro. If nVidia hadn't hired him and put the whole RPU project on the back burner I suspect you'd be arguing from the other side.

    • Many reviewers including Steve have said you should turn it on as the performance hit is not significant; however, same reviewers have also said you should not buy NVidia over AMD just for ray tracing. There simply are not enough games for that to be the deciding factor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

      I think you've misunderstood. For that matter, so did Linus.

      NVidia, by their own language, is "all in on raytracing"-- and yet, it hasn't quite been the literal game-changing technology they want it to be-- anyone remember bump-mapping? It took awhile to be accepted, and when games adopted it, it was great-- but nobody missed it until it became commonplace, and RT on game engines hasn't hit critical mass yet.

      But someone got impatient at NVidia, and decided to force better coverage out of their reviewers--

    • Actual 3090 owner reporting in. They exist. Paid retail for mine.

      Playing CP2077 on 1440p@144. With everything cranked to "ultra", plus SSAO and RTX cranked to "psycho" (the latter enabling global illumination on all light sources), still getting 55-80fps with DLSS "Quality" enabled, and that's with my core at -65MHz to accommodate an undervolt. DLSS Quality is indistinguishable from native in CP2077, you're not losing anything except a tiny bit of detail in depth of field, IE: places where it's already

  • they are withholding GPUs also from their customers, so no biggie!

  • Tone-deaf or malicious? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JJJK ( 1029630 ) on Sunday December 13, 2020 @06:19AM (#60825104)

    Linus and some others described it as tone-deaf, how nivida paints tech reviewers as cheapskates who are just in it for the free hardware.

    I have a hard time believing that that's what nvidia actually thinks. If you have a good product that works well, you want to give as many reviewers access to it as you can, and the cost of the unit is well worth the publicity. And anyone who even qualifies for getting free hardware and pre-release drivers, even if they didn't have any integrity at all, is long past the point where getting free hardware would be a serious part of their business model.

    The letter looks very carefully crafted. A part of it was pure marketing-speak, clearly not aimed at a lone reviewer whose literal job it is see through marketing-speak. It was directed at the larger audience of people he inevitably would publish this letter to. It's aimed at driving a wedge between reviewers and their audience.

    Nvidia would love nothing more than have their press releases be the only representation of reality out there. They don't want anyone to figure out how the 30XX line only looks good because the 20XX line was actually a step back in price/performance, or that this is still not the generation that makes raytracing a good alternative to pure rasterization. So they've decided to copy the most destructive ideas from all those anti-democratic movements around the world, and attack journalism directly by trying to pit its audience against it. "Look, these cheapskates get hardware for free that you desire but can't even afford, and then they probably just spend the rest of the day playing games!"

    What nvidia actually wants is essentially like an Amazon-review-scam: For some free hardware, give us a glowing 5 star review, make sure to hit these points.

    Of course they are "apologizing" now. That entire e-Mail was written in a way that screams "if you're angry, share it with everyone you know so they can read our ad copy too!". It's really chilling.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

      No, tone-deaf is exactly what this is. Some assistant director to the VP of the department of Marketing decided that not enough emphasis was being placed on raytracing, and therefore they attempted to strong-arm the entire community into better coverage of raytracing by leveraging one moderately popular site.

      It is a spectacular example of misunderstanding the review community, the gaming community, and tech people in general.

    • If the aim is to drive a wedge between reviewers and their audience, they not only failed miserably, but that backfired something fierce. The audience is all fired up at Nvidia, and are backing the reviewers to the tune of immense money. Yes, money.

      This is a windfall for reviewers, and has caused an increase in distrust of Nvidia marketing by the "halo" audience, the ones that GPU and CPU manufacturers need the most, because they are the people who average users go and ask what to buy.

      If it was crafted by N

  • An interesting metric considering 99% of games on Steam are utter trash, and 90% of the remainder are indie games without the resources create AAA graphics.

    It's hard to ignore NVIDIA here, looking to AAA titles released in the past year which not simply PC releases of console games, I'd say the majority supported raytracing. Add to that games that support DLSS and the number increases further.

    I for one would be pretty pissed if I were cluelessly following a single reviewer who compared the 3080 and 6800XT a

    • It's hard to ignore NVIDIA here, looking to AAA titles released in the past year which not simply PC releases of console games, I'd say the majority supported raytracing.

      And you would be wrong. As of November 2020, only 24 games total (not 2020 releases) support RTX based ray tracing. [digitaltrends.com] The other problem is what do you mean by "support". Not all games use ray tracing for everything. Some games only do shadows; some only global illumination, and some reflections etc.

      Add to that games that support DLSS and the number increases further.

      First of all, that was not the complaint about DLSS. Second, so you might have added some more games. And "some" is the word.

      I for one would be pretty pissed if I were cluelessly following a single reviewer who compared the 3080 and 6800XT as equal only to find I couldn't crank the graphics up on the most anticipated game of the year on the 6800XT.

      By crank up graphics, you mean overclocking using custom liquid cooled setups? Because t

      • Not all games use ray tracing for everything.

        Nice goalpost move there. Why is *what* it's used for relevant? Here's a hint: Precisely zero games use raytracing for everything.

        And you would be wrong. As of November 2020, only 24 games total (not 2020 releases) support RTX based ray tracing. [digitaltrends.com]

        A nice list covering most triple A titles that weren't console ports. So by saying I'm wrong you're citing that I am in fact completely right *golfclap*. Now why do you think I mentioned consoles? Because consoles drive the technological adoption within games due to cross compatibility and increased sales. Quite critically, both new consoles feature raytracing acceleration hardwa

        • Nice goalpost move there. Why is *what* it's used for relevant? Here's a hint: Precisely zero games use raytracing for everything.

          You posted: "Reviewers only showing off a fraction of the capabilities or feature set are quite really crap reviewers." You complain that Hardware Unboxed showed off "a fraction of the capabilities" while failing to acknowledge even when games use RT, they are showing off a fraction of the capabilities. Is this point clear enough for you?

          A nice list covering most triple A titles that weren't console ports. So by saying I'm wrong you're citing that I am in fact completely right *golfclap*.

          You posted: "I'd say the majority supported raytracing". No, you're just wrong about this fact and are unwilling to admit it. It is not a "majority".

          Now why do you think I mentioned consoles? . . .

          I didn't mention anythi

  • Sixteen years ago a debate between nVidia's David Kirk and Professer Philipp Slusallek of the University of Saarbruecken had completely the opposite spin, with Slusallek arguing for native raytracing support and Kirk arguing for rasterization and general purpose GPUs.

    In 2004, with about the transistor budget of a late-90s video card, Slusallek was performing real-time raytracing at 60 FPS. Kirk claimed a conventional GPU could do as well.

    Shortly thereafter nVidia hired Professor Slusallek and the whole sub

    • Thanks for sharing this cool look into the past. I might have missed something, but my reading from that debate was largely that Kirk claimed raytracing already worked on graphics cards (mostly supported by references to theoretical floating point performance), while Slusallek claimed that dedicated ray tracing hardware was best although CPUs actually performed better than GPUs for this task.

      I don't see any claims about competitive frame rates for RT either, rather 2-3 FPS for rendering on dual Opterons.

  • Seems like the only problem was with the email, which was stupid. Nvidia could have found another excuse that was more generic and this bruhaha would have been avoided. After all, there is a widely reported shortage of GPUs, so that would have been a convenient excuse. There was no reason for the Nvidia marketing guy to send the stupid email.

    BTW, do people really believe that AMD doesn't also try to funnel free GPUs to more favorable reviewers? If that's the case, perhaps AMD needs to upgrade its market

  • People acting surprised by this behavior from nvidia.

    They have been this evil for a long time, not just now.

    Remember when they used their own drivers to disable their own cards, if an AMD card was also detected in the system?

    Yeah, thatâ(TM)s actively screwing their own customers.

    But todayâ(TM)s people only care for themselves and will continue giving nvidia money, so nothing will change.

    Lets hope RISC-V becomes something, because knowing nvidia, they have some nasty plans for ARM.

    Theres no way tha

    • Heck Nvidia will even disable their card if another nvidia card is in use in the system. GPU passthrough is a bit of a nightmare for virtualized hosts on the nvidia side of things.

      Still if the pricing for Ampere is any indication, their absurd pricing last generation was felt, and the lack of community support hurt them. Unless AMD makes some not minor changes (and has actual supply not wasted on consoles), the 3070 will be the best value for this generation, and that has rarely been the case wherever AMD

  • Of course NVIDIA doesn't want to focus on rasterization, AMD closed that gap and is now offering better performance per W, and the same performance per â.

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