Nvidia giving free GPU samples to reviewers that follow procedure

AMD didn't enforce SAM, Rage Mode or AMD CPUs for that matter

 

Here they give 22 seconds to ray tracing performance in one title, at one quality settings across two resolutions and then conclude that the new RT cores offer no improvement over 2080ti which is "super disappointing to see". Seriously, tell me this is a thorough investigation of ray tracing performance. I like hardware unboxed. I watch all of their reviews. I find them useful, but the quality of their look into ray tracing is poor in this nvidia fe reviews.

Edit: I guess my point is that if they were doing a more thorough look at ray tracing in the Nvidia FE reviews and Nvidia was still asking them to add or drop games to look more favourable, I'd be 100% on the side of hardware unboxed. As it is, I can see both angles. Nvidia is giving the card for free and wants all of its features explored more thoroughly, but Hardware Unboxed has the right to tailor their content to their viewers, their workload and their personal preferences. I'm kind of 50/50 on this one.

 

HWU doesnt bode well for next gen if they ignore RT etc.

 

Their conclusion is correct. Despite Jensen Huang claiming that the 3070 is faster than the 2080ti its on par or only slightly ahead according to TPU's review.

 

Seriously? One game, and Tomb Raider of all games? Ray tracing performance is highly divergent depending on the coherency of rays etc. I'm not saying the 3070 is better than the 2080ti and I don't really care if Jensen Huang is correct or not. 22 seconds of one game at one quality setting across two resolutions is not a thorough review, it's actually quite a bad one in terms of RT benchmarking.

 

It’s a 3070 review, not an Nvidia sanctioned ray-tracing review.

They also clearly — as well as Gamers Nexus — state: “if you’re looking for RT performance benchmarks and comparisons, we recommend you to check out other high quality review channels and websites.” Additionally they have criticised AMD’s performance in RT titles, and their lack of a DLSS competitor. I’m not sure how much more transparent you want them to be.

Furthermore, they have stressed that due to time constraints caused by concurrent and sequential hardware launches, they haven’t had time to do ray tracing deep dives. CP2077 will get its own RT and DLSS deep dive either this month or after the new year break.

 

What an enthusiastic new poster we have!

 

’New’

 

@Wesker I’ve never said hardware unboxed is not transparent. I’ve said they did a poor job of benchmarking ray tracing in their 3070 and 3060ti reviews. Yes it’s not their primary focus, of the main interest of their viewers. They’re also very busy with many products launching in the same timeframe. Doesn’t change that they didn’t thoroughly review ray tracing. Nvidia no longer wants to provide cards if it’s not looked at it depth. That’s their right. They don’t have to give away anything for free. I do think it’s bad pr for Nvidia, and I do think hardware unboxed is overall a good review site.

 

I love how many people are supporting corporations getting to decide if a review of their product is fair. Just do things the corporation wants if you want to keep doing your job! Don't let them catch you doing wrong think, they have the right to a "fair" review, just read through their review guidelines on everything that is "fair" and everything that is "unfair".

In the perfect world, nobody owes HWU free cards but without access to cards before launch, they can't make a launch review and thus basically makes any video they make later when they do buy and get a retail card shipped completely old news and pretty much kills their viewership. This way, launch day reviews are all basically what Nvidia wants people to watch. If you criticize anything, you are potentially just going to lose your ability to do a launch review and basically basically lose out on large amounts of views and w/e financial compensation that generates. People here seems to support reviews becoming PR releases. Big reviewers likes to shit on MSI or ASUS for doing shady review incentives but Nvidia just gets away with it cause Nvidia holds enough leverage.

AMD only has 20% of the market share, so not getting Nvidia reviews might as well kill 80% of the reason to do reviews. God help us if AMD goes back to 50% market share and get enough leverage to do the same and then reviews become just reading the PR statements each company puts out.

 

NVIDIA didn't dictate what reviewers say or don't say about their products, the conclusion and the value of the product is still entirely up to the reviewer, nobody touched that. What we have here is a situation where one outlet is actively being lazy, and biased to the point of being called out by thousands of users on Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and various forums for doing a botched job representing ray tracing, to the point of dusting off a minimalistic RT game like Dirt 5 and using it to represent the dozens of RT games out there despite the presence of far more significant examples, not to mention ignoring RT all together in their videos. Anybody not seeing through this obvious bias is simply defending laziness, ignorance and bias from outlets.

It's a dick move by NVIDIA no doubt, but the outlet get what they deserved for all I care. NVIDIA shouldn't support such sub par reviewing standards.

 

In the united states don't you have to disclose that the gpu was given for review ?

I mean this is a good point on their end

 

only that you received it for review, not if the company dictated how the review should go, what benchmarks to focus on, and so on.

Nvidia shouldn’t have to give anything to anybody, however, with 1 million views on YouTube somebody will get at least a few thousand dollars in ad revenue.
If you get a product early then you get to make that video. If you have to buy it after all the reviews hit you are less likely to get that many views.

so even though the review is not bought, reviewers especially smaller ones rely on receiving products early to make their money. So in a way the early reviews are “bought”; if you are not positive you lose your day 1 review videos and you lose a lot of revenue

 

What a pathetic excuse, 80% of the games tested by them is not even released in 2020, most reviewers test a majority of 2019 and 2018 games, from which there was plenty of RT games to choose from, HardwareUnboxed is in full "making up BS excuses" mode now.

And Godfall is not featured in any top reviewed list, not by a long shot. It's a crappy game no one plays, yet it is featured on their games list, instead of more important titles such as COD Cold War, Control or Crysis Remastered.

 

The equally exaggerated other side to this rhetorical coin is to say "I love how many people are saying that companies have to provide free, early copies of luxury consumer products to "reviewers" to support their Youtube channels, regardless of how fair a review is".

In reality neither of these statements represent what has actually happened here.

I'm not a fan of either Nvidia's actions here, or of Hardware Unboxed's bafflingly anaemic coverage of ray tracing.

I can't speak Latin, but I believe the phrase is "reductio ad absurdum".

It's 2020 and graphics card reviews are their bread and butter. They needed to find the time to go into detail on probably the single biggest advance in game rendering in more than a decade. It's literally their job.

Nvidia are dicks, but HU have walked into this.

 

Questions to ask yourself;

Are reviewers entitled to receive free graphics card samples from the manufacturers?

Are manufacturers entitled to receive free marketing if they provide a free sample to reviewers?

nVidia wants an editorial direction change in order for Hardware Unboxed to receive these cards again in the future. Does this strike you at all as nVidia extorting free marketing from their reviewers?

 

According to the Steam survey, only 2.25% of Steam gamers have a 4K primary display, but hell, that gets plenty of testing.

It's almost like they're testing against criteria that would be relevant to buyers of brand new, high end, very expensive GPUs. Either now, or in the near future. Hmmm.....

 

Just about every game released on consoles has some form of RT options, these games are on PC too, and they have ray tracing. Since the RT is better on pc, they shouldnt review RT at all on any platform to keep parity.

 

Interesting reading comments from HU supporters who suspected their bias:

Nvidia have banned Hardware Unboxed from receiving founders edition review samples : nvidia (reddit.com)

 

I actually don't believe that hardware is biased in the sense that they prefer AMD to Nvidia at all. I think they have personal preferences, which lean away from ray tracing. Maybe AMD is delivering more of what they like, but I don't think they're misrepresenting anything. They don't focus on ray tracing, and they direct people to other reviewers for ray tracing info. That's fine. I don't think that's a vendor bias. They just prefer performance with lower settings.

The conflict comes from the exchange between them and Nvidia. When companies give you expensive consumer products for free for testing, what is fair for them to ask for in return? Is Nvidia asking for anything unfair if they're asking for more expansive coverage of ray tracing? Obviously everyone in here has different answers to those questions.