Self-inflicted AMD PR Drama [Nano Fury Edition]

Moloch said:
Techreport won't be getting one to review http://techreport.com/news/28971/wanted-for-review-amd-radeon-r9-nano
I suspect AMD is mad since he pointed out the settings used by AMD's internal benchmarks were unrealistic (0x AF for example) in order to make the FuryX and Fury look more favorable than in reality.
Great PR work AMD ...
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That probably didn't help, but at least AMD deserved the beating after claiming that the stock Fury X could beat the 980 TI and that it could overclock even further with minimal effort.

I think what really pissed off AMD was Scott's obsession with the Fury X's pump noise. Yes, early retail Fury X units had some very annoying pump noise, but not all sites communicated AMD's response to this issue in the same manner.

Where places like Anandtech and Tom's presented AMD's entire response and said that AMD would ensure that affected units could be replaced through the typical warranty process, Scott only presented part of AMD's message, leaving out the part about how AMD "will work with its graphic card partners to ensure the satisfaction of the small number of initial customers who observed this specific sound." Instead, they just kept pounding the issue down people's throats with numerous links to other reviews, creating an image that AMD was somehow "denying" that this issue existed and it was up to TR to prove that it did exist. That TR article left a bad taste in my mouth after I read AMD's entire response on a different site. :cry:

And it really upsets me because I love how TR reviews GPUs. They really do frame time benchmarking about as "properly" as I could want. I'm only aware of like one other website that does anything remotely as thorough as TR.
 
homerdog said:
All would be well if AMD priced the Fury line right, but for $650 you could buy a mother fucking GTX980Ti which is frankly better in every way. Withholding review samples will only make things worse. The reviews will still come out and if AMD thought they were biased before..

On the plus side, AMD saves a few hundred dollars for every card they don't send, so they lose a little bit less money this quarter :)
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Yes, pricing is out of line and AMD's fucking terrible PR isn't helping them sell me thinks.
ImSpartacus said:
That probably didn't help, but at least AMD deserved the beating after claiming that the stock Fury X could beat the 980 TI and that it could overclock even further with minimal effort.

I think what really pissed off AMD was Scott's obsession with the Fury X's pump noise. Yes, early retail Fury X units had some very annoying pump noise, but not all sites communicated AMD's response to this issue in the same manner.

Where places like Anandtech and Tom's presented AMD's entire response and said that AMD would ensure that affected units could be replaced through the typical warranty process, Scott only presented part of AMD's message, leaving out the part about how AMD "will work with its graphic card partners to ensure the satisfaction of the small number of initial customers who observed this specific sound." Instead, they just kept pounding the issue down people's throats with numerous links to other reviews, creating an image that AMD was somehow "denying" that this issue existed and it was up to TR to prove that it did exist. That TR article left a bad taste in my mouth after I read AMD's entire response on a different site. :cry:

And it really upsets me because I love how TR reviews GPUs. They really do frame time benchmarking about as "properly" as I could want. I'm only aware of like one other website that does anything remotely as thorough as TR.
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Yes and AMD sold the Fury X as an overclocks dream and we all know how they turned out, not only doesn't it overclock for shit but it doesn't seem to scale very well, mostly just uses more power.
TR's article on pump noise didn't bother me much but I could see how it might.
 
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Fury X isn't the better buy over 980Ti, but Fury certainly makes a better case compared to 980 when you look at reviews at 4k. Which is why it's surprising that it didn't look far better than 980 at TR while demolishing it in other reviews. As for Alatar's defense of the review, the Fury non-ref card they used wasn't overclocked and using the OC'ed 980s without mentioning such in the graphs only led one to come away with the impression that once you overclocked the 980 it left Fury in the dust. From his own forum one user writes,

Techreport recently published an interesting review. I have to say that GTX 980 looks like a much better choice than Radeon Fury.

Fury is barely beating GTX 980 in 1440p and it have huge issues with incosistencies with frames where GTX 980 is much more fluid.
Get a OCed Gigabyte or MSI and you will beat a Fury by a good margin and enjoy consistent and fluent gaming.
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Or even the AMD subreddit,

https://www.reddit.com/r/AdvancedMi..._tech_reports_review_of_r9_fury_390_and_390x/

Hocp end up testing best playable IQ settings and won't do 4k by default. Besides their usage of games like Dying Light where performance can swing from 15% in favor of 980 over Fury and 31% in favor of Fury over 980 once nvidia DoF is disabled won't show Nano in best light if they are using the highest IQ settings.

Why not give the sample instead to Tom's whose Fury X review had it topping Titan X?

BF4 - Titan X 10% faster
FC4 - Fury X 13% faster
GTAV - Titan X 11% faster
MetroLL- Fury X 11% faster
SoM- Titan X 2% faster
Witcher3 - Fury X 1% faster
Thief - Fury X 3% faster
Tomb R- Fury X 4% faster
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http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x,4196.html
 
Moloch said:
Also Fury and Fury X doesn't look as good as the 980 and 980 ti cards in terms of frame time consistency in a large number of games, AMD has yet to match nVidia in that area for single GPU cards let alone dual gpu cards..
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290X does better in 'frame time consistency' than 980 here,

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1059?vs=1351

And besides XDMA crossfire was acclaimed to have put AMD ahead of nvidia, so the if there was some catching up to do it was for nvidia.

homerdog said:
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but just in case I must point out that sending a card to Scott would not preclude AMD from sending one to Tom's. Well, I sincerely hope it doesn't.
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Well they did have an accurate shortage of Fiji cards to be sent to reviewers, one sample got around in Europe. And Nano is a niche product anyway.
 
HardOCP's reviews are terrible. Their "highest playable settings" are a complete joke, some kind of motive they found to impose their own subjective tastes on framerate-vs-quality onto their readers. Not to mention that they can use these tests to let their bias run free.
Add to that the fact that MSAA, AF, texture detail settings, etc. have different impacts on different architectures, and you get test results that are completely useless from a practical point of view.

I don't understand how anyone with even a shred of interest and knowledge about PC gaming can ever bother to read HardOCP's reviews.


There. I said it.
 
homerdog said:
All would be well if AMD priced the Fury line right, but for $650 you could buy a mother fucking GTX980Ti which is frankly better in every way. Withholding review samples will only make things worse. The reviews will still come out and if AMD thought they were biased before..
On the plus side, AMD saves a few hundred dollars for every card they don't send, so they lose a little bit less money this quarter :)
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Maybe AMD just don't have that many cards to hand out. Period.
TechSpot, one of the few mainstream sites that do timely game GPU/CPU performance testing, has neither a Fury X or Fury (Steve Walton had to hand the review samples on). While MGS, isn't exactly graphics intensive, it still looks like AMD are content to aim a big gun at their own feet by not cashing in on a marketing opportunity.
 
ImSpartacus said:
Yes, early retail Fury X units had some very annoying pump noise, but not all sites communicated AMD's response to this issue in the same manner.
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The official AMD response was almost entirely bullshit though. They said only some review units had this noise, and in reality these boards were all over the retail channel as well.

AMD deserved a bloody nose for that issue. Being forthright and honest with customers and potential customers alike is much better than trying to deny or sweep your fails under the rug.
 
gamervivek said:
290X does better in 'frame time consistency' than 980 here,

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1059?vs=1351

And besides XDMA crossfire was acclaimed to have put AMD ahead of nvidia, so the if there was some catching up to do it was for nvidia.



Well they did have an accurate shortage of Fiji cards to be sent to reviewers, one sample got around in Europe. And Nano is a niche product anyway.
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http://techreport.com/r.x/radeon-r9-fury/w3-99th.gif
http://techreport.com/r.x/radeon-r9-fury/fc4-99th.gif
http://techreport.com/r.x/radeon-r9-fury/c3-99th.gif
Was talking about Fury though and XDMA didn't put them ahead, it just helped them, a lot.
 
Dont forge that TR stilluse Fraps, this is way different than FCAT.. used by other sites.

There's a debate aboutt Fraps or FCAT anyway .... I dont know.

Personally i have allways respect TR and even for me they are still a large reference, this said, when i compare the reviews of Fury with the TR one (both was mostly the the Asus Strix ), really theres not one game numbers who seems in scope....

Every reviewers have their own lineup, workflow, whatever we will allways see difference, some most obvious that other, so understand i dont want at all discredit the TR one. And this is not at all the far big difference i have seen between reviers.

I take the guru one, because it was the most easy to find ( note, that i dont find their review more accurate ), i dont even post the fps, because it is really funny if i will do.. ( complete invert results )

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asus_radeon_r9_fury_strix_review,31.html



index.php

Guru3D
as you can see, there are four stutters recorded. This is me actually truning around to another location in the game (frametime wise lower is better).
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index.php
index.php

index.php
 
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ImSpartacus said:
Where places like Anandtech and Tom's presented AMD's entire response and said that AMD would ensure that affected units could be replaced through the typical warranty process, Scott only presented part of AMD's message, leaving out the part about how AMD "will work with its graphic card partners to ensure the satisfaction of the small number of initial customers who observed this specific sound."
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The messaging in the TR story is not a truncation of what was given in the stories published at the other sites, the wording is different and those stories were published about a week afterward.

Instead, they just kept pounding the issue down people's throats with numerous links to other reviews, creating an image that AMD was somehow "denying" that this issue existed and it was up to TR to prove that it did exist. That TR article left a bad taste in my mouth after I read AMD's entire response on a different site. :cry:
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Can you provide a link to that response? It's not the ones in the other sites linked, unless the additional claim is that one of the three sites heavily rewrote AMD's response(s).
 
3dilettante said:
The messaging in the TR story is not a truncation of what was given in the stories published at the other sites, the wording is different and those stories were published about a week afterward.
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Oh wow, you're right about that. I definitely didn't remember that correctly. Idk, maybe I mistook that TR article with a later one. I appreciate you pointing that out.
 
Techpowerup isn't getting a sample either:

There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.

The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
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http://www.techpowerup.com/215776/amd-radeon-r9-nano-review-by-tpu-not.html
 
I suppose it could be open to interpretation whether AMD is punishing some reviewers, or if it chose not to give its reason for not broadly sampling to reviewers. Perhaps the latest rejections now have the "not enough samples" reason given how negatively not giving one (clarification: not giving a reason) to TR seems to have turned out.
The cases of Fury X samples being taken back seemed to make it clear why AMD was refusing to give them, although that could be a case of having a ready excuse to hide a lack of samples.

Less seriously, AMD is picking fights with reviewers until the last one standing gets the one Fury Nano sample.
 
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Who will be given official Nano review samples?

It's problematic (on multiple levels!) if AMD says it has limited stock and thus picks and chooses who it gives out samples to. Because A: one might conceivably believe they would choose sites they reckon will give favorable reviews, and as a function, withhold samples to sites they think might be prone to more negativity. Also, because B: if they have so few Nanos that they can't hand out a few dozen (at most) samples to the press, then fucking hell, what on earth are they doing over there...?
 
BRiT said:
Because its how companies get free publicity for their products.

If a company doesn't want publicity for their products then they can act like AMD is acting like, but they shouldn't because AMD is getting negative publicity now.
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But why are company obligated to give out samples at all? The negative publicity is only become this is deviating from the norm. The whole idea of generating publicity because you send out review samples is something that shouldn't really matter to people but yet they expect it. They are then mad that they did not get what they want. The whole system is just weird.
 
They're not, except they're deviating from the norm that they have supported for decades. The negative publicity comes from them selectively bypassing sites for review samples. They would have been better off going with a new policy of no review samples at all for all products going forward. The fact they they haven't done so at all over the past decades suggest it is more valuable to the company to seed review samples.

Tl;dr the companies deem it beneficial to seed review samples.
 
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