Nvidia Pulling the Plug on GPP

Look like it...

Maybe a lawyer of Nvidia have finally got his top manager listening how much it was risky to take this road ?

As for Kyle, if you remember, not so long time ago, it was with AMD that he had a problem, and he is still there.

 

Make me remember the story of the overclocked Asus, MSI and other bios, given to reviewers... and when it have appears, most reviewers have explained, that since years they was asking directly to thoses brands to send them the original retail bios for doing fair review for the consumers, but during years, you have never see one of them who have tell the consumers about this practice. ( the deal was, send us the retail bios, and we dont publish anything about your practice ).. ( most funny is the difference in performance the gpu's reviewed was small )

 

Context on video from youtube link:

Our info dump on everything we collected on GPP up until now, nVidia's now-defunct "GeForce Partner Program."
Buy GN's glass logo cube or Modmat! https://store.gamersnexus.net/ These purchases will help support us in making videos like this, given the obvious relationship hits we take.

We talk about issues we have with nVidia's GeForce Partner Program retirement letter, which frames the situation as if nVidia is the victim and that consumers and media are "why we can't have nice things." This discussion also goes into some concerns we have with the over-arching PC hardware industry, which has become increasingly "influencer" focused, thus reducing capacity of manufacturers to withstand criticism. Any criticism is now perceived as a slight, even with a long-standing history of professional product reviews.

Finally, we add some of our source information on what was happening with GPP.
NVIDIA article: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/05/04/gpp/

 

One snippet that was interesting/new out of the GN video is that from their contacts some of those that did not sign up to GPP was because they have existing agreement with Intel that would conflict (partnership-marketing fight between Intel and Nvidia in this segment is going to get messy as both are going heavy handed route).
His context outside of that comment is that GPP was also more designed to combat the lower gaming and mobile segment that Nvidia feels under threat from, although IMO yeah pretty obvious GPP was implemented to also impact dGPU and squeeze AMD there; maybe as punishment or attack back due to how they see themselves being targeted deliberately by AMD-Intel collaboration - not saying this is right to do but just analysing part of the reason potentially why in a segment they are not challenged in a way to require it.
This may also tie into his point from contacts that Nvidia Geforce side has started to go backwards in terms of behaviour and starting to be more vindictive like they were in the past (comes back to at least Geforce management/Geforce marketing-partnership team, which would also be GPP).
If the intention was to combat Intel-AMD collaboration in the lower segment/mobile primarily, well they really screwed up in their implementation of GPP, made worst by Teeple's lack of direction/communication.

 

GamersNexus' video corroborates with Kyle's assertions that the threats that nvidia was making about withholding stock from non-GPP partners were not in writing, but rather in verbal suggestions.
To me, this just further proves that had this ever gone to a formal investigation, it would come down to personal testimonies and not document analyses (duh).

How many publications have been on record claiming that nvidia has turned vindictive with GPP?
From the back of my head there's HardOCP, GamersNexus and I think Luke also mentioned it during a Linus video.
I wonder how many publications were directly (and successfully) coerced in keeping their mouths shut around GPP.


There are publications who tiptoed around the subject and/or flat-out refused to talk about it until GPP was formally cancelled. Kyle behaving as.. well, Kyle.. is now in the process of pointing fingers to those who did it in a not-so-subtle way, and it's popcorn material.









Don't ever go full Kyle Bennet, guys... even if you're partly or fully right about something.

 

Kyle sounds like my kind of guy.

 

lol he's not shy is he.

 

Yatta! Kyle victory tantrum!

Digisan gets out the popcorn

 

He does indeed.

 

HardOCP's twitter feed has a bit more of those. There's also a back and forth with Hothardware, though TBH those guys presented the GPP termination news as the most suggared fluff piece of all publications so far, to the point of them being blasted by their own readers in the comment section.




Going back at that John Teeple character, it looks like he has quite the history in his resume:

- Senior Manager of Global Service Provider Marketing at Intel between 2001 and 2006, which is the period when Intel got caught bribing OEMs and retailers to not sell AMD processors;
- Director of Americas Channel Marketing at Seagate between 2007 and 2012, the later being when Seagate was suspected of practicing price fixing
- Director of Partner Marketing during GPP

nvidia may have hired the man based on his... experience.

 

Kyle is 3edgy5me.

 

To be fair Kyle pushed too much as fact when it was not validated while could be said others did not say enough because either as journalists want validated-proofed information or did not want to rock the boat.
It partly corroborates Kyles assertions; remember he did an article purely based on a Elric's youtube about Kyle being paid and it was never clarified if that came from the Nvidia source (quite possibly did but Elric never cleared it then or ever afterwards) so Kyle did a complete article based on speculation about how Nvidia Geforce division is playing games against him.
Also Kyle never mentioned that some of those who did not sign was because of a conflict agreement it would cause with what was already in place by Intel, which raises questions there about both of those IHV being heavy handed in this fight.
Kyle also made a big thing about 'Gaming' brand name being excluded from AMD, which turned out not to be true with Arez.
TBH I prefer a balanced approach as seen by GN and have respect for Ryan Smith who was trying to validate the information before reporting too much even though he was under pressure from readers to say something (he did say he was chasing up various OEMs/AIB partners at various times).
That said it is fair to say without Kyle the story would never had received the traction it derserved and needed, so Kudos to him.

 

Yeah Nvidia should really scrutinise his and Geforce management and especially with the Geforce division culture going backwards in terms of behaviour and engagement-operation.
Maybe this also ties in starting at the time and reason Scott Herkelman left Nvidia (to get away from it) for AMD.

 

He did? Where?

All I saw were tweets saying he found the issue as "petty from both sides", and absolutely no article at anandtech discussing it until the termination was announced (where they simply disclosed what was said in the blog post, though were fairly critical of the lack of communication from nvidia).
They did casually and quickly mention GPP when the Asus Arez brand was announced, but that's about it.

Maybe the wrote something in AT's forums?

Now, I don't think AT was under pressure from Purch to not publish anything, because Tomshardware did cover it and gave proper credit to HardOCP at the time.
(They could be under pressure from someone else, though.. Someone vindictive..)

 

We're quickly heading into the territory that got the previous thread closed.

But before we inevitably get there, I just want to state that I think it's pretty insulting to insinuate our good friend @Ryan Smith is anything other than fair and balanced. Ryan has done nothing in the past that would justify that treatment. There's no grand conspiracy against AMD within gaming journalism, let alone at AnandTech.

At any rate, I think it's safe to say no one cares about Kyle's "vendetta" against gaming journalism. He's just looking for attention. Let's try to stay focused on "GPP"...

 

Oh please will you stop it already? Arez was some bullshit invented at NV's bidding which ASUS subsequently killed INSTANTLY once GPP died. Seriously, how you can keep coming up with this apologist nonsense is beyond me.

 

Please read the post context before attacking, the post was on aspects Kyle was mistaken or took beyond speculation, where other journalists seem more reluctant either from a journalism aspect (validation and actual context which is where I see GN and Ryan Smith in this) or not to rock the boat.

I mention Arez because they DID use Gaming Strix as part of the name, not raising for any other reason in that post.
To repeat; Kyle also made inference to the point that AMD would NOT be able to use Gaming nor Strix in their brand with AIB partners and reinforced in their forum.
I said nothing else in that post about the good/bad of GPP but explaining how Kyle used some speculation as facts and importantly never corrected even HardOCP moderators in the forum when they said exactly the same thing even more succinctly.

And you missed one point as did a few others (not clearly shown but pretty fundamental) that will have an impact on AMD down the line; with Intel already having heavy handed agreement in place conflicting with Nvidia's heavy handedness partner plan strategy (contacts validated by GN saying there was a conflict between both with agreements/contracts for some) could still be bad for AMD down the road when caught between these two financial-resource titans relative to AMD when all three are aggressively now targetting lower/mobile gaming-casual devices.

 

Strix is not ASUS' gaming brand though, that's ROG. Strix is their silent running brand (because you know, strix = latin for owl, which are silent hunters...)

 

A simple clarification to what you think was wrong in the previous thread would have been welcome, instead of closing the thread with "this thread is awful and you should feel ashamed if you posted in it".
I know I pushed the report button several times within that month to complain about the several derailing attempts, so the thread where I posted countless news updates could be saved from being closed.
The result was I should feel bad for posting there and the thread was closed abruptly without any warnings.

So worried about the integrity of the forums because someone is allegedly insulting Ryan Smith, yet you close a thread with a literal ad-hominem on the dozens of users who posted in it?
I know a private forum doesn't have to be fair, but it would be nicer if it was.

I'm sorry, who insulted whom?
AFAICT I'm one of the two who even mentioned Ryan Smith in this thread and I did no such thing!
I simply stated what anandtech's coverage around GPP was and I was as factual as possible.

What is the insult here? The suggestion that anandtech's staff could have been under pressure from nvidia to not talk about it, like so many publications openly stated it happened to them?

I'm a fan of anandtech. Probably the biggest fan in my entire 10 million people country. A good guess is we all are, here in B3D.
But does that mean we can't describe the site's publications or what its staff stated in an open platform through anything other than blind praise?

If there's something incorrect in my description, feel free to point it out. I may be wrong. I'm not perfect. I correct myself all the time.
But I'm not taking accusations of insults lightly. Much less towards someone I'm a fan of.

AFAIK, you're the first one to ever mention a conspiracy from the media against AMD in this thread or any other.
At most, I suggested many publications may have been coerced into not talking about GPP because some publications stated as much.
Feel free to disagree and present counter-arguments, but against arguments that were made and not arguments that were not.

You mean you don't care that a man may have sunk his livelihood to bring the subject to the public while most of his peers stood by, or you don't care about how he's lashing at everyone?
I disagree with the first but can agree on the second (I made my criticism on his twitter rants pretty clear). Sure, I'll stop posting Kyle's rants and I'll even delete them if you want, but no matter how hot-headed he is, without him there could be no public knowledge about GPP, and things could have taken a very different path.





And yes, I'm aware of what I'm risking with this post.
Yet, this crap feels like I was branded half a decade ago and since then this just bites me in the ass on random encounters with none to very little regard to me or what I try to contribute to the forum on an almost daily basis.
If you're eager to use the hammer, hammer away.
And here's the paging to @AlexV that you always suggest. Might as well go all the way.