The ugly side of Nvidia: A rollercoaster ride that shows when Big Tech doesn't get it

[amghwk]

Everyone and their dogs know that RT sucks. Big time. Even when using a 3090. At least for now.

Nvidia needs to buckle up and push harder to give gamers anything that don't give the abysmal performance hit while only providing very minor differences, if any.

For now, RT is good only for slideshows and for clueless RT fans.

Shame on Nvidia, though, for this latest stunt. Obviously it's not good enough to even put it's cards as a challenge to all benchmark reviewers.

 

[Achaios]

Ngreedia has grown so big and arrogant that it has become an evil for the consumer and the market that they are so big and dominant and all-powerful.

And ofc along with size comes arrogance and the "you will write what we want or else".

Ppl at nvidia must be under a lot of pressure as they must be losing market share to AMD GPU's or they must be seein' analyses that predict this will be the case.

Imagine if AMD's GPU launch wasn't a paper launch and they actually had any GPUs to sell.

 

[hahahanoobs]

He's an entertainer like Top Gear - TBF - he has some insights - He is not meant to be cut and dry . Most folks for GPUs probably skim was reviews to 16 game round up and conclusions . A GPU is a GPU is a GPU - I will read Motherboard reviews more as they are more nuance -

Like Top Gear - how our $300 cars crossed Antarctica - LT how well does my $10 Aliexpress PC run Doom Eternal -

Don't insult Top Gear.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I'm next in line for ray tracing if the price and performance is right.

Raster alone isn't going to get us better visuals, because higher details WILL require more complex GPU's, because we def aren't getting it from CPU's.

 

[MarkHughes]

I don't often watch Linus videos but that dude can lay down a serious rant! LOL

 

[quadibloc]

I'm glad to see that Nvidia reversed itself.
I can understand, though, the motivation. If it wasn't for ray tracing, if the only thing one considered when evaluating a graphics card was its plain-vanilla rasterizing performance, AMD would basically win every price-performance comparison hands down.
From Nvidia's marketing perspective, that's hardly a fair comparison. It ignores that fact that Nvidia is ahead in the most advanced area of graphics.
From the perspective of a lot of gamers, of course, in the real world they're wanting to compete with other gamers, and so of course even if a game has ray tracing available, they're likely to play with it turned off, to get the best possible frame rates. Oh, and at 1920 x 1080 resolution, too.
I suppose that from Nvidia's perspective, the day can't come too soon when the most popular games won't even run on a card without ray tracing, and don't let you turn it off. That's one way to level the playing field. And, because that can happen, Nvidia's cards are more future-proof.
And, of course, Nvidia has DLSS now, not real soon now. And it continues to have a better software suite than AMD - this is very important, because a product has to work, to let you do what you want with it, before its level of performance even matters.
It's clear what AMD has to do; it has to devote resources to getting its software act together.
As for Nvidia? Its products still justify premium pricing, and leading the industry in more advanced tech is part of why that's true. Changing direction 180 degrees isn't what it needs to do. But it can't let itself get so caught up in its ambitions that it forgets what the interests of its market are.

 

[quadibloc]

Speaking of "objective journalism", Tech Spot's political views don't belong in their reporting.

I mean, I've noticed this on Ars Technica. Not that I mind their political views, but I can understand that people holding different views might be unhappy with the site. I haven't noticed it on TechSpot, but then I haven't really been looking for it.
I suppose you don't read The Register either. If you want to talk about a tech site with political views...

 

[Jules Mark]

CP 2077 's mirror don't show any reflection at all. For a title that have mirror like puddles, this game is fake.

FAKE!

 

[HardReset]

Everyone loves the underdog. AMD needs support because without them we would be stuck standing still like Intel for longer then I can remember. Nvidia is not Intel. Bottom line is Nvidia has invented almost all major graphical enhancements. Dx12ultimate is a perfect example. They could have just called it DX12turing. The bias in the media does a disservice to the consumer. Not all consumers understand the technical details to make an educated decision. They rely on the media for help. AMD does not have an answer for ray tracing and DLSS. These two technologies are game changing. The media's lack of bashing AMD over the head has people thinking a 3080 and a 6800xt are equivalent because they perform some tasks the same. By not holding AMD accountable you are giving them a pass. We need AMD to keep pushing the competition, we need Nvidia to keep innovating.

Yeah right. AMD published Mantle. Then Khronos group adopted it and gave it new name, Vulkan. Around same time Microsoft looked at Mantle and made slightly refined version of it. That was named DirectX 12. After that there was no longer need for Mantle, it had server it's purpose.

So DirectX 12 and Vulkan are both essentially same as AMD Mantle. Nvidia had no role on either one. So much about Nvidia invents everything...

 

[BSim500]

No one will care but I will say. I have never used ray tracing. I have enabled it twice and was not impressed. I have never played a game with it enabled. I stopped even thinking about it.

Same here. Like 64x Tessellation, 8x MSAA, 4.0 DSR (rendering 4k for a 1080p monitor), does it "look better"? Yes. Is it worth the massive performance drop during actual gaming outside of side by side static screenshot comparisons? Not remotely so. I'd rather see better optimised games on normal hardware than epeen fuelled p*ssing contests to push sales of overpriced vapourware space-heaters.

 

[McMurdeR]

For a company looking to secure approval for a buyout of of ARM holdings from various competition authorities across the globe, this is very interesting behaviour.

Gives a real insight into what the thinking is behind closed doors - how they view the media and their customers.

 

[duckofdeath]

I'll post a video on YouTube saying, "best RT ever!", if you send me a free RTX 3090, Nvidia.
It would be in the best interest for you, other gamers and the rest of the industry.

 

[Irata]

Nvidia are going to face a serious backlash I suspect. Deserved too, every bit of it.

You think so ? Like for their „only allowed to report positive things“, their video card branding guidelines, Bumpgate, dying 2080Ti. Imo, nobody cares.

They are probably wiping their tears with $1,000 bills.

There will be zero backlash, just like before. Reviewers will probably be more cautious though.

Just look at the statement above the mentions Batman Arkham for cool new tech but not over tessellation that hurt performance on nVidia cards but absolutely killed it on the competition‘s GPU.

 

[Markoni35]

Just look at the statement above the mentions Batman Arkham for cool new tech but not over tessellation that hurt performance on nVidia cards but absolutely killed it on the competition‘s GPU.

That's how Nvidia always played it. They'd work with game developers to use code that hurts AMD cards more than Nvidia cards. Even if the final result makes the game slower on Nvidia as well (for no reason relevant to gamers). Everything was dedicated to ruining the opponents in benchmarks, rather than in optimizing the games to run faster.

And that's still the case. If it wasn't for this war between the video cards, games would be much more optimized and run much faster. Same goes for CPUs, same goes for operating systems.

Have you noticed how Windows 10 got much slower with HDDs in the last few years? Not far ago you could run Windows 10 from a HDD, even from a slow laptop HDD. Nowadays if you don't have an SSD it's almost useless. You're forced to buy an SSD or a new laptop, even though it's theoretically the same OS with a few patches applied. Patches that made it much slower.

 

[DudeMatt]

Anyone really surprised that Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter's methods of narrative control seeped into Nvidia?

 

[Kanan]

It's pretty bad and wrong comparing a bottom end GPU to a very useful GPU like the Radeon 7, but aside from that the article is spot on and it is good to see that Nvidia came down to admit their misstep.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Anyone really surprised that Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter's methods of narrative control seeped into Nvidia?

GASP... a corporation willing to do Anything to control the narrative involving said products???

I can’t believe they’d be this “capitalist”.

 

[Endymio]

It's easy to get high and mighty here and claim the reviewer was "only looking out for the little guy". Yet no one on Earth is purchasing 3090s to play games at 1080p in non-raytraced modes. Yet that was the very first benchmark in the review. And, despite the fact that this game was hotly awaited largely over hype for its "next-gen" raytracing, this was left out of the review entirely, with the tacit admission that it was done for reasons of time pressure.

Now, it seems Techspot wishes to rewrite history and say RT performance was omitted because "99% of games on Steam feature raster-only pipelines". How are the pipelines of other games relevant to the performance of this game? I had one question when I first read the article: "what card do I need to purchase to get acceptable RT performance". And, from reading the posted comments, others had the same question.

Certainly NVidia seems to have overreacted somewhat. But even more wrong-headed are comments from the pitchfork-bearing mob claiming they acted because they didn't receive the "review numbers they wanted". They acted because a major feature of their product -- a feature to which they have devoted enormous R&D and a large part of the silicon die of each chip to -- was being ignored entirely. That's a quite different matter. And if -- if -- that ignoration actually was Techspot editorial policy-- a justified decision on NVidia's part.

Thankfully we see that this wasn't editorial policy, and indeed was just a simple matter of time pressure. The issue is over. Time to lay down your pitchforks.

 

[Badelhas]

This is why I ditched Intel and will ditch nvidia soon. They don't have consumer oriented strategies.

 

[Irata]

They acted because a major feature of their product -- a feature to which they have devoted enormous R&D and a large part of the silicon die of each chip to -- was being ignored entirely. That's a quite different matter.

Pushing these new features is nVidia‘s marketing department‘s job, not reviewers‘.

Thankfully we see that this wasn't editorial policy, and indeed was just a simple matter of time pressure. The issue is over. Time to lay down your pitchforks.

Radeon 6800 and 6900 reviews had an RT section that made Ampere look very good for those to whom it matters.

Then there was an entire review dedicated to RT performance on the 3080:

Ray Tracing & DLSS with the GeForce RTX 3080

With Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 out the door, it's time we take a deep dive into ray tracing and DLSS performance to show you just how fast...

www.techspot.com

 

[Endymio]

Pushing these new features is nVidia‘s marketing department‘s job, not reviewers‘.

To "push" features, no. It's the reviewers' job to tell us how well these features work. Which you yourself admit they devoted substantial time to doing -- just in articles other than this one.

NVidia treated this review in a vacuum, rather than looking at Steve and Tim's entire review history. A poor decision, but certainly understandable. You're acting as if the entire NVidia board convened a three-day summit to discuss this. The reality is one person in marketing --certainly a couple levels below C-Suite, and likely harassed and overworked -- made a snap call.

In any case, if a reviewer wants true independence, they have a simple route to it -- don't form a relationship with the manufacturer. Buy your review hardware like any consumer does. Advance hardware access and free review samples come with a string attached. We the public hope that string is very thin, and consists of no more than a proviso to treat the product fairly. But it is naïve to pretend that the string doesn't exist.

 

[poohbear]

I'm an Nvidia shareholder, I'm guessing Nvidia stock might get hit with news like this. Nowadays, alot of investors are millenials (the "retail" investors, aka "Robinhood" investors), and they actually read tech news and are up to date on the gaming news of Nvidia unlike institutional investors. When Nvidia does ridiculous things like this, which causes bad publicity, and makes AMD look good, I'm concerned. Nvidia can't rely on the power of their hardware without resorting to pressuring review sites? That's a huge red flag on their products!

Don't be like Intel and try to win market share through shady tactics like this. That never helped Intel in the end, and this year their stock price got obliterated and never recovered. At the end of the day Intel stopped producing competitive products and consumers bought AMD. Do NOT be like Intel, and let your products do the speaking.

 

[C4L4V3R4]

Men , how hard it's for nvidia understand that I dont want ray tracing ,in only play online competitive fps , so ? Nvidia you only must launch gpus without the beautiful and expensive feature and then you will be like always a choice more budget friendly but don't , you choose to frightening the entire community to adopt this , shame ..

 

[Makste]

In case you missed my comment, video cards are not just to game on. Ray tracing was always high end workstation level for creators, and no effort was made to bring it down to gamer level. More money in video production, plus no "minimum hardware" requirements to play back. Just a TV or a monitor.

Content creators (Think TV, movies, South Park animations all the way to Shrek type animations, and even game creators)... we use video cards too.

And not all of us can afford a Pixar type workstation. We need to build our own.

Sorry, my bad. I read "TechSpot" as the title. And I like a lot of what I read here. But was hoping for more "Tech" and less "Consumer gaming" for products that are much more than a gaming video engine.

Just my opinion that "TechSpot" should be about technology as well as gaming. And that is what this topic was all about. Nvidia wants to be more than a custom game console engine. And once that happens, the games produced will also profit from being ray traced. The games are not there yet because the platform is being ignored in the press.

The point you are putting across is solid. However, doesn't ray tracing performance in games also reflect its performance in content creation?
I think you can obtain a clear picture of how the RT performance of a card could be in content creation from its performance in games at for example 4k.

I think that Nvidia's approach to what they are advocating for is wrong, it goes to show how belittling they are of tech reviewers. A simple email suggestive of new benchmarks which clearly bring out the picture of what they want from their product, could do without the threats.

My appeal to journalists is to always expose these kinds of threats to the public. Sensitisation goes a long way. Water, air, fire and earth are still free resources. I can do without Nvidia. It should stop acting like it owns the world.

 

[bviktor]

"Nvidia apologized and walked everything back." Someone (or many someones) at nVidia deserve to be fired.

You must be naive to think this kind of systematic approach didn't come from the CEO itself.