No, Rev. It's exactly as SirPauly put it. They want gutless, unquestioning, amatuerish pawn website reviews. Plain and simple.
This is the correct viewpoint for a marketing department. You want the sites in your hip pocket to do your reviews as the easiest path of manipulation lies in this kind of distribution. I dont have to go into Riva3D's past experience ("If ya pull review with criticism, no more review cards.")... how Firing Squad needed to pull their "Win2k shootout!" review, where it was quickly replaced with Win98se scores for the Geforce products *ONLY* for this Win2K benchmark article (lol).. or the opposite kind of thing with successful manipulation of competitor's reviews (Give you 3 guesses where HardOCP got their "Quack" knowledge and binary patching program, the first two guesses don't count. It starts with an N..). These are the preferred distribution lines.
A good example- NVIDIA knows screenshots of Quincunx on the GF4 do not illustrate Quincunx output quality. They also know that all the sites they have chosen for product launch wouldn't delve or question that the screenshots they take look drastically different from the IQ on their monitor in-game. So, these sites become the preference to "slip by" these kinds of things. It lets them get away with most anything. And by other associations, they know dropping an email with a bin-hex editor or patch program, these same sites will do a 4-page comprehensive analysis of 500x zoomed image scrutiny (or in some cases even convinced to do photo-retouching to create a non-existent issue) when it involves a competitor for something that either doesnt exist or isnt as blaringly obvious.
Take a look at the real history of where this line of reasoning originates from. New GF4 drivers on the "Big 5" with massive AF filtering preformance improvements. Beyond3D probing a "Performance" and "Quality" mode of AF to show there are improvements in performance, just not to the degree the other sites are blindly touting (i.e. the fastest performance is yielded when using the LOD fudged mode in OGL). This is the kind of in-depth probing this site has always been known for and simply wont allow ANY IHV to get away with. Sites using non-publicly available drivers in the case of one IHV, on non-publicly available benchmarks is also a preferred case for this tactic. You will also see the same, mutli-paragraph scrutiny of IQ issues for one IHV (i.e. effects missing on brand A's ICD) but with absolutely no scrutiny or mention of the other.
It becomes painstakingly clear what their marketing department is molding for their products. I consider this brilliant work and really congratulate NVIDIA's PR/Marketing and public relations officers for their mastery of this facet of product launch. There is nothing really "wrong" with this and it's a good thing for them. But I do think there is something wrong when all of their long, hard work is to be swept under the rug and discounted.
No product is perfect. Under scrutiny, all products can be exploited to show their flaws/weaknesses. The desired result for *any* organized marketing effort is to get your product in the public eye with none of it's flaws exposed, and with all the competitor's flaws illustrated in major detail. NVIDIA is simply using their keen knowledge of what sites will do just this and ensuring a successful launch. Beyond3D never has fallen into this category of website so therefore it should be excluded from such a product launch marketing campaign.
)... not just, or necessarily reviews... because it is a type of content they can deliver in a way that nobody else does. Ever since the server problems and B3D being down for soo long, and the staff shuffling etc. B3D has never really gotten back to that core of what made it such an incredibly good resource for information, which led to a lot of links/references/plugs all over the 'net because this was where you went for that content.
