No more FX reviews.

[2senile]

"but I have made it clear that I will not be reviewing any further FX series graphics cards"

The above quote is from a post in this thread at 3DVelocity.
http://www.3dvelocity.com/cgi-bin/i...a2d00c747782bf8f412450cd8788;act=ST;f=4;t=276

PixelatOr, AKA Wayne is the site founder & Editor in Chief.

In my opinion, if other sites did the same we might see a change for the better.

 

[digitalwanderer]

The reviewer also says it took him by complete surprise and there were no warning signs of this...

 

[2senile]

The reviewer also says it took him by complete surprise and there were no warning signs of this...

Point out where it says that please. The only "surprise" expressed in that thread was that a person was surprised that Gabe Newell came out so strongly. The thread started as a Valve/Half Life 2 affair.

 

[digitalwanderer]

The reviewer also says it took him by complete surprise and there were no warning signs of this...

Point out where it says that please. The only "surprise" expressed in that thread was that a person was surprised that Gabe Newell came out so strongly. The thread started as a Valve/Half Life 2 affair.

Doh! I misread the thread.

I misread "All I'll say is that nothing we're seeing now wasn't predicted by us when we looked at both the 5800U and 5900U." as "All I'll say is that nothing we're seeing now was predicted by us when we looked at both the 5800U and 5900U."

My apologies, my error, and I gotta go write a quick apology up and eat a bit of humble-pie....then I think I'll go play GTA:VC and try and get the whole nVidia stink out of my hair for a while.

 

[Doomtrooper]

I respect 3DVelocity, when we had 3DGPU and GURU3D posting rave reviews about the the FX 5200-5800...3Dvelocity was the only site that showed how bad the IQ was.

 

[Typedef Enum]

Holy smokes...

I was just getting ready to start a new thread entitled, "No more nVidia reviews."

I've had it with them, and I know just about everybody else has too. I strongly suggest that noise be made in order to convince as many websites to completely boycott everything/anything nVidia. Nothing.

No reviews...nothing.

 

[2senile]

Holy smokes...

I was just getting ready to start a new thread entitled, "No more nVidia reviews."

I've had it with them, and I know just about everybody else has too. I strongly suggest that noise be made in order to convince as many websites to completely boycott everything/anything nVidia. Nothing.

No reviews...nothing.

A blanket ban would be counter productive IMO. The danger of being labeled anti-nVidia would be increased.
The problem is with the FX, most people are now aware of that & it would be easier for them to understand websites refusing to carry out further reviews until nVidia cleans its act up. & its drivers.

In that post the guy said he would be doing a Q&A session & asked for questions to submit to nVidia.
I'm trying to think of one that I don't expect to be answered with the usual PR crud.

 

[Typedef Enum]

It's useless talking to them dude. I know, I "worked" at nvnews for darn near 2 years (was it really that long?)

I have a bunch of emails from Brian Burke that would him look like such an ass right about now it's not even funny. And I bet you he would _still_ try to weasel his ass out of it.

Nobody is going to tell you what they really think, and they will almost always tell you what you want to hear. Think about that set of slides in which they point blank stated that they would not compromise IQ for performance. I knew right then and there they were totally full of sh*t, and that it would be a matter of weeks before the thing blew up in their face.

What's even more funny is the fact that those _cowards_ essentially blamed the whole thing on a "zealous" engineer (or whatever the hell their wording was). Yeah right, like it was some dude sitting there in some corner, doing it all on his own. They didn't have some directive(s) from above that said, "OK Pal, we're going to ask you to discover clever ways so that we can chear our asses off. Kool?"

That's precisely what gutless cowards do. Pass blame on to somebody else. I really do hope NV40 is late again, sucks ass, really hot, underwhelming, etc. I so much want to see these losers become legitimately irrelevant.

 

[gkar1]

Its extremely funny to me that they had the opportunity to drive the industry forward by leaps and bounds, but instead chose the path of greed and deceit. I guess i put too much faith in the goodness of the human spirit.

 

[horvendile]

Apart from possible personal satisfaction, I don't see what purpose a review boycott would serve. Exchange "review" for "hailing devoid of critical analysis" and I agree, but I don't understand information black outs. Why can't we let people vote with their money instead?

 

[RussSchultz]

Its extremely funny to me that they had the opportunity to drive the industry forward by leaps and bounds, but instead chose the path of greed and deceit. I guess i put too much faith in the goodness of the human spirit.

You make it sound like they had a choice: put out a competitive product, or simply lie. There was no point in time where the executives looked around the table and voted on the proposal "Shall we put out a good product, or make a bad one and lie about it?".


NVIDIA put out a product that wasn't as good as its competitor. They're doing the only thing they can do: market it until their next product cycle which (hopefully for them) will be better.

They can only compete on price so much before margins become negative.

Would you be more pleased if they simply closed up shop at the first hint of trouble with a sign on their door: "We were pwned by ATI"?

You attribute too much malice to a company which has no feelings. The only instict a company has is self preservation.

 

[THe_KELRaTH]

Rather than a review boycott it would seem more beneficial if with every review included pre 3dmark03 cheat drivers (the ones before NV35 score jumped up an amzing 2000+ points), in tests and also a point of fact reference list of all known flaws .. aka.. such things as No AA on the horizontal axis.

 

[demalion]

"Marketing" is indeed the only thing they can do.

That doesn't negate the specifics of what they chose to do for their "marketing", and those specifics are the problem. Using the word "marketing" doesn't change that, or how remarkable and unique the specifics are.

 

[GraphixViolence]

You make it sound like they had a choice: put out a competitive product, or simply lie. There was no point in time where the executives looked around the table and voted on the proposal "Shall we put out a good product, or make a bad one and lie about it?".


NVIDIA put out a product that wasn't as good as its competitor. They're doing the only thing they can do: market it until their next product cycle which (hopefully for them) will be better.

They can only compete on price so much before margins become negative.

Would you be more pleased if they simply closed up shop at the first hint of trouble with a sign on their door: "We were pwned by ATI"?

You attribute too much malice to a company which has no feelings. The only instict a company has is self preservation.

With all due respect, this is a seriously f***ed up position Russ. Do you think Nvidia is the first company that ever put out a product that wasn't the best available? Since when did that give anyone license to lie to their customers? Do you see Matrox, S3, 3DLabs, etc. doing anything like this now?

 

[RussSchultz]

Get over it. I'm not justifying it or defending it.

I'm simply stating that's how it is. They have a company where people work and need to continue to work in order to get the product cycle out. If you come clean and say "our product is second best by a long shot" you lose nearly all sales and the company crumbles.

Lets look at history, and the creative marketting that went on:

S3? Lets consider the S2000 and its T&L to be enabled in future drivers.

Matrox? Something about an OpenGL driver that took a year or two to materialize.

ATI? Quake/Quack for one. Compressing light maps for another (If I remember correctly)

The whole industry? Massive cheating in WinBench and other benchmarks in the DOS and Win3.1 years.

Cheating and lying is nothing new. it doesn't make it right, but it is a fact of life in the computer hardware world.

BUT THAT ISN"T THE POINT!

If you notice, I particularly took exception to Gkar1's characterization that NVIDIA CHOSE to make a bad product and lie about it, rather than make the morally good choice of a competitive product.

That is a truly asinine position to take.

The rest of what I said isn't my opinion, its me reciting how the world works.

 

[Sxotty]

Russ is right, but too many people dont seem to understand that.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

If you notice, I particularly took exception to Gkar1's characterization that NVIDIA CHOSE to make a bad product and lie about it, rather than make the morally good choice of a competitive product.

True, but you've got to remember that Nvidia's style of business is a choice the company has taken. They have always relied on die shrinks and faster memory to advance clockspeeds, along with eeking out incremental improvements of their products, in order to maximise the profit from a given product line. They have always introduced new features that are unusable, but given them marketing tick boxes. They have always dropped IQ for speed, cheated in their drivers, and lied about it. They have for the last few years been an arrogant, marketing led company that spends more time making PR spin more than making good products. They thought they were untouchable, with no serious competition to worry about.

This time around they were blindsided by ATI, and it's not surprising that their strategy above has now come back to haunt them, crippling the whole of (at least) NV3x in comparison to the competition. Maybe they didn't *chose* to make an inferior card, but it not difficult to see how a lot of the choices they made have brought them to the position they are in now. It's not like Nvidia were unlucky - the choices they took, and are still taking today, has put them where they are, and lost them a lot of brand loyalty.

Question is, does Nvidia have the guts to really change the way they do business and run the company in order to fix the source of their problems, or are they going to think they can just lie and cheat their way back into the number one spot?

 

[demalion]

Get over it. I'm not justifying it or defending it.
...

As you proceed to: 1) equate every hardware manufacturer as being equal while ignoring any contrast in the items you list, your support for them, and comparison to what nVidia has done; 2) propose that the only alternatives were between proclaiming loudly about inferiority and what they actually did, because everything anyone else ever did that wasn't loudly proclaiming their inferiority was somehow equivalent; 3) propose some new meaning of "justify" and "defend" that doesn't fit that action, when for the rest of the English speaking world those words do fit.

I know you're capable of ignoring my quoting and detailing this in extreme specifics and with abundant support, and that you're capable of completely ignoring any relevance of my discussing why your usage of "not justifying or defending" is completely and utterly nonsensical and unrelated to the words you are using applying to your statements.

Pardon me for being inconvenient and making a case for the possibility of there being a problem in your stance in the face of your unwillingness to even begin to entertain such a thought, but your not wanting to deal with such inconvenient things as disagreement and people being able to point out how your statements are lacking are incompatible with the statements you actually make.

Until you have an alternative to your current response of ignoring the support provided for disagreement to restate your viewpoint over and over again (I recommend critical review of your viewpoint based on people's replies and the flexibility to admit error as an effective solution), I'll continue to be able to point out your being at fault in the communication failures you demonstrate.

That's "the way it is", though there seems to be a logical presentation to go along with this assertion on my part. Feel free to make a case against the logic, but understand that a case isn't successfully made simply by you showing up and saying something, but by what you say making sense.

I've already covered the difference between "they had no choice but marketing" and "their marketing is no worse than any other marketing", so please don't go on defending "they had no choice but marketing" when I attack "their marketing is no worse than any other marketing", completely ignoring how obvious the difference was made.

 

[RussSchultz]

Sigh. You get one more chance and then get ignored.

I did not say they were all equal. At no time did I exonorate NVIDIA. I said look at these other examples in time of creative marketing (lying and/or making knowingly false promises) as butressing proof that it is historically a fact of life in the industry.

Wait...scratch that. You just get ignored. I don't have time for semantic arguments with you especially when you immediately sink to calling me incapable of using the english language properly.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I did not say they were all equal. At no time did I exonorate NVIDIA. I said look at these other examples in time of creative marketing (lying and/or making knowingly false promises) as butressing proof that it is historically a fact of life in the industry.

But wouldn't you also agree that sometimes the industry goes way too far and crosses the line somewhere from "good business practicality" to "unethical behavoir"?

The first example that comes to mind for me is the Ford Pinto that was released with the known rear-impact explosion risk because Ford figured it would be cheaper to litigate the accidents that came up rather than fix the products defect...but that's just the first.

There is a line between the two, and a lot of people feel that nVidia is WAY over that line on the wrong-side and that "business marketing" just isn't an excuse for flat-out lies and deception. (Not to mention cover-up, strong-arming, etc.)

I just can't agree with your statement Russ, sorry...but it did cure me of the giggles at least.