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.
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.
HWU doesnt bode well for next gen if they ignore RT etc.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting reading comments from HU supporters who suspected their bias:
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.