Nvidia giving free GPU samples to reviewers that follow procedure

With just about every game having it, seems a strange personal preference.

Maybe they dont like next generation hardware and games

 

That's quite the exaggeration.

 

Even on consoles.

 

How many games were released last month, and how many have RT?

 

Spider Man Miles Morales, Spider Man Remastered, Call Of Duty Cold War, Watch Dogs Legion, Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition, Gears 5, Observer: System Redux, all released literally last month and all have RT on consoles, and that's just the start of this gen.

 

And that's not even including games that only use DLSS which have been released since last month.

 

And just about every (serious next gen) game going forward has it. Stray uses it, both pc and ps5 game. Dont forget Godfall either, it has RT for the PC. And it looks amazeballs on pc

 

"Just about every new game has RT"
Proceeds to link 3 videos of the very same game.

How many PS5 games will have released this year? About 50?
Out of those, are there more than say.. 8 with raytracing?


On the Xbox Series' side, there are what, two? Watchdogs Legion and some other?



This one is really nice BTW:

 

It’s pretty wild to me that people can conclude HWU is biased.

 

What an absurd proposition. They're a small independent team of reviewers, not a corporation with interns and thousands of man hours to spare, and nor do they have a time machine.

In the time span of one month they had to review: AMD Ryzen 5000 series, Intel Tiger Lake, Nvidia RTX 3080, Nvidia RTX 3090, Nvidia RTX 3070, RTX 3000 AIB partner models, AMD RX 6800 XT, AMD RX 6800, AMD RX 6900 XT, RX 6000 AIB partner models, and Cyberpank 2077.

They had to make a choice: cover RTX and DLSS in depth and avoid making accurate comparisons between Ampere and Navi 2nd gen; or match up Ampere and Navi 2nd gen in head to head comparisons. In an ideal world, sure, you would cover both. But that is physically and economically not possible.

Simply saying "too bad, they should've done their job" is immature and delusional, and reeks of privilege.

Consoles with RT hardware just came out. As RT implementations improve -- which will happen once game devs adopt RT as a norm -- such that they don't tank performance for negligible gains in image quality, HUB and Gamers Nexus will switch to RT implementations being standard.

Seriously, this whole situation is as stupid as demanding all reviews to focus on DX10 upon the release of Nvidia 8800 GTX and ATI 2900 XT. No one cared about DX10 games, and the implementation of DX10 games sucked, for a good 6-12 months.

The amount of grifting done here for Nvidia in this thread, and elsewhere online, is disgusting.

Had this been Intel, AMD, or Apple, pulling these shenanigans, the same people defending Nvidia here would be in an uproar.

Yep, the same review site which told people to avoid the 5700 XT for a good 3-6 months due to crap drivers, and called Radeon VII trash, are definitely biased in favour of AMD.

Give us a break.

 

I lurked for a while to learn about the microarchitectures. But the fact that posters are willing to accept editorial direction from manufacturers is astonishing. I firmly believe that you wouldn't accept AMD demanding raster based titles and minimization of RT, enforcement of SAM, Rage Mode or AMD 5000 series CPUs or Intel dictating memory selection for testing.

But it's an acceptable 'dick move' if Nvidia does it? A company with a coloured history of benchmark manipulation (3DMark/2001, HAWX, Witcher 3)? If it's a question of journalistic integrity I'd rather wait until reviewers who purchased the GPUs afterward finish their testing. There were already questions hanging on Nvidia NDAs.

Accusing me of being a former poster won't strengthen your arguments either. A lot of posters have been far more enthusiastic in their defense of Nvidia's action than anywhere online

 

If AMD gives you a brand spanking new 6900XT should you review Godfall for 3 minutes, change your testing rig to a 5950X, turn on SAM, Rage Mode and fill the benchmark list with raster based titles? They didn't do it but should they have done it?

 

LinusTechTips speaking on the HUB snub issue:



Not a good decision when you wage war against independent reviewers, and the biggest tech channel sides against you.

EDIT: Discussion starts around 4:30.

 

Now post the Nvidia subforum comments on the issue

 

They should test the features of the card to the best of their ability, which includes SAM and Rage Mode and see if they can come up with a general trend in performance. That said, Rage mode is not an industry standard. SAM (or resizable BAR or whatever it's called) is, and it should be tested broadly. DXR is a full-fledged API and a major feature of DX12.

As far as I'm aware Nvidia did not ask Hardware Unboxed to do anything specific like test particular games with particular settings. They asked them to test ray tracing more extensively. Hardware Unboxed can do their tests and come up with any conclusions they want. It's a bully position where they're trying to force Hardware Unboxed to focus on the things Nvidia wants them to. You won't get any disagreement from me about that.

 

@Wesker So Linus is arguing that the only transaction between the vendor and the reviewer is that the vendor gives the product to the reviewer and the vendor gets a fair review out of it, which is essentially free marketing. But from Nvidia's perspective, if your reviews are directly comparing your product against your only real competitor head to head, and not doing much to test one of the products major feature sets, is that a fair review? Like I said, if you review the 3070 in one ray traced game and conclude that it's "disappointing" that the RT cores haven't evolved from the 2080ti, is that fair?

I get it, youtubers essentially live off of getting things for free. Their entire standard of living is propped up by getting free products and reviewing them. If they had to buy shit, the economics of their business change entirely. So it's a hill they'll die on. They can all band together against Nvidia and say they won't review FE products if Nvidia starts putting any general conditions on the reviews. It's what they'll have to do.

Edit: He even says reviewers are effectively a marketing exercise for vendors ... So why would they continue to do business with marketers that they don't think are representing their products fairly? I don't like what Nvidia is doing. I think Hardware Unboxed is a good reviewer, and there's no win for Nvidia in cutting them out of the early access review cycle. This is a PR blunder for Nvidia. At the same time, I understand why Nvidia is unhappy with the arrangement. I just think they must have some handlers that work with reviewers that could have taken a softer touch and tried to work with them to come up with something mutually beneficial.

 

If an Nvidia review is effectively marketing, why consider it credible or objective at all? We don't know the contents of the NDA either.

 

Uhm, is there really a difference?

 

There shouldnt be a NDA

 

I agree with Scott on this. Really stupid move by Nvidia with a lot of downside and basically zero benefit to them. Jayz2Cents was very, very rough on the 6900xt but you don’t see AMD throwing a tantrum.

On the flip side most graphics card reviews are pretty shit in terms of actually reviewing the product from an end consumer perspective. Nearly everyone including HWUB just puts up bar charts and calls it a day. It seems Nvidia singled out HWUB because they have been vocal about their disdain for the current state of raytracing but a lot of other sites are guilty of the same superficial coverage. The average gamer won’t really be informed about the vast majority of features just from reading a review.

Nvidia has no obligation to give reviewers free anything but it’s not like HWUB is being that negative, they’re just not touting Nvidia’s advantages as much as Nvidia would like. GN hit the nail on the head when they said the worst part of this is that any site that does actually give RT and DLSS a fair shake will do so under a cloud of suspicion.