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

[Wrinkle]

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

Honestly, in the age of youtube scandals most people will have forgotten about this within a month (apart from the fanboys, they will take this to their grave). The whole conundrum won't even put a dent in Nvidia's sales.

As a consumer I will buy the card that comes closest to my requirements and the amount I am willing to pay and I don't care if it's from bully-boy Nvidia or sweet summer child AMD. The same goes for HUB, they just want to create content to inform people and make money of it.

 

[fadingfool]

Disgusted with nVidia over this and will not consider a card from them again for a long time if at all (my 1080Ti will need replacing at some point). I would also be wary of the "back tracking" as it only takes a small delay to put hardware unboxed behind the curve on launch days.
Who thought this was a good idea? Any attempt to coerce reviewers will taint all good reviews from everyone as we will all assume the shill (we already take with a pinch of salt any "received item for free" reviews on Steam). As I said nVidia are now bottom of the choices for my next GPU and I will also hold off reading or watching any other nVidia reviews/articles until after I have watched HuB and read Techspot's reviews (just in case of shenanigans).

 

[quadibloc]

It is informative to learn from these comments why this whole thing happened - due to time pressure, one review from Hardware Unboxed just covered raster performance, and that review in isolation made it look like Nvidia products wouldn't get a fair shake from them. This, to me, is enough to allow me to accept this as a mistake on Nvidia's part and not to see them as "evil".

 

[raddude9]

On a hunch, I just had a look at socialblade. Techspot got 35 thousand YouTube subscribers in the last 3 days, that's about 33k more than they would have expected based on their recent numbers. Well done Nvidia, you've just made Hardware Unboxed even harder to ignore. Muppets.

 

[Khanonate]

See people always call from someone's head and that may happen to satiate the herd mentality, but this is a corporate culture issue that starts from the top. Rather than demanding someone get fired, how about we demand there is accountability from Jensen on down to stop this toxic behavior.

I agree with you. Now off with their heads!

 

[raddude9]

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.

hmm, I'd consider the "Infinity Cache" to be the biggest innovation of this generation, AMD is managing to beat (at 1440p anyway) a 384 bit GDDR6X card, with a 256-bit GDDR6 card. The implications of this development are that the price of these cards is going to drop more rapidly than if Nvidia still had free reign over the top tier. To me this is great news, Nvidia have been far too successful lately in pushing up GPU prices.

 

[imdarkbreeze]

AMD would basically win every price-performance comparison hands down.

This is the one segment where there are generally at least moderately more consumers that care more about maximum performance than they do about price-performance. I see a lot of users looking to get as much extra as they can, regardless that it might require paying more just for the graphics card than the whole rest of the system.

I don't think that screams bang for buck nearly as often as we see users looking for exactly that in other components.

 

[Puiu]

I find it sad to still see people defending NVIDIA for this crap. But I guess it's human nature to defend your ego instead of what is right.

 

[Gars]

Im with all the people that mentioned productivity
is there any benefits from RT tech, that works in/with any render engines?
or it needs 'special drivers'?

sry for the off topic

 

[Lounds]

I think this is a good news to keep tech journalism as a whole more neutral and if a review is sponsored by the likes of Nvidia, tech reviewers needs to be transparent about that but should also have the freedom to scrutinize the supplied products.

Steve and the HUB team as the best in the business. No one puts in the hours they put in.

One thing I will add that a few people have mentioned is that Nvidia does innovate and there's no denying that, technologies such as DLSS2.0 are game changing as Nvidia clearly see that limitations of silicon semiconductors are coming soon, realistic how long does silicon have left as a material for carrying on semiconductors tech such as CPUs and GPUs.

I'm looking forward to AMD's implementations of 'Super resolution' and how that stacks up against DLSS.

 

[Ktom2020]

I think this is a good news to keep tech journalism as a whole more neutral and if a review is sponsored by the likes of Nvidia, tech reviewers needs to be transparent about that but should also have the freedom to scrutinize the supplied products.

Steve and the HUB team as the best in the business. No one puts in the hours they put in.

One thing I will add that a few people have mentioned is that Nvidia does innovate and there's no denying that, technologies such as DLSS2.0 are game changing as Nvidia clearly see that limitations of silicon semiconductors are coming soon, realistic how long does silicon have left as a material for carrying on semiconductors tech such as CPUs and GPUs.

I'm looking forward to AMD's implementations of 'Super resolution' and how that stacks up against DLSS.

Nvidia isn’t obligated to send you their new cards. And nothing stops you from “gasp” buying it after the card launches for you to do a review on it.

 

[Krackan]

I think NVIDIA should stop giving out cards to anyone with a YouTube channel, period. Let the people who want to review it go out and purchase it. I'm far more inclined to believe someone that has to spend their own hard earned money on a game/hardware review than I am someone with a literal room full of free hardware.

 

[Krackan]

Wrong site for that, this is a gaming hardware site.

Hahahaha this is a mish mash of blogs at best, this site is definitely not Gaming or Tech oriented moreso than it is political or meme-based with several writers hopping over from Kotaku.

 

[SeekerJBP]

Im with all the people that mentioned productivity
is there any benefits from RT tech, that works in/with any render engines?
or it needs 'special drivers'?

sry for the off topic

The render engines are best when matched with a high end GPU. They are all designed to do ray tracing (that is basically how they work) so it offers a VAST improvement over CPU only, or CPU plus the wrong video card. On a side note... Nvidia GPU's are matched to the top render engines because they are designed by and around Nvidia products. So it makes a HUGE difference! No additional drivers required... they are part of the render engine.

 

[urbanman2004]

Boo hoo, big meanie NVIDIA won't send me a FE GPU to review so I think I deserve attn from the "community" for such disrespectful treatment as well.

 

[amghwk]

To some of the disabled, heartless commenting people here, do you think Techspot or Hardware Unboxed or any other reviewers can't afford any of the FE cards? They can purchase more than you people can buy 1 card for yourselves.

These people are established reviewers that companies like Nvidia are actually giving them for their own marketing. The data they put up are the reasons people like YOU make an informed opinion and decision to buy a product. Or would you people rather submit to whatever benchmarks Nvidia itself is shoving down your throats?

Basically what Nvidia said is that either you write down what we want the sucker gamers to know or we'll stop giving you the best cards for reviewing. Which part of it is difficult to get through (your) thick skulls?

Go watch what JayzTwoCents or LinusTechTips say about it at YT.

People like you are the ones buying what cards come out at the top of the benchmarks which these reviewers do it for you. And you are using these reviewers' benchmarks which they are doing for YOU so you people can buy what is good and what YOU can afford.

Or you can start your own channel and start buying every founder's edition BEFORE release and benchmark every game in a plethora of graphics cards, motherboards, RAMs and CPUs and their combinations and put them up yourselves to prove your point of buying for review thought. Before whining like some clueless teens.

 

[mrvco]

Thankfully Nvidia apologized and 'walked it back' so the people that have been trying to defend Nvidia's position in the original letter sent to HUB can just stop that nonsense.

 

[ypsylon]

I don't plan to defend nVidia because they behave as intelligently as a brick wall, but people saying that they buying AMD solely on this are just mad. <Sarcasm on> Because AMD never did it... </sarcasm off>. What kind of lunatic you are? There was same kind of extortion with FirePros and stuff just in very niche space. One of the reasons why nVidia basically took over both consumer and Pro markets. Greens are more bad that Reds, but just tiny little bit. Just like Reds are equally as bad as Blues in CPU segment. nVidia apologized, but smell will stay for a good while...

On the other side, tiny part of the argument on nVidia side is valid. Nobody in "tech influencers" reviews explores actual full performance of the card. Nobody does compute rendering of popular rendering engines (well GN has some thinly veiled residual input here). Nobody does CUDA benchmark analyses. Nobody announces support under which version of IRAY or OptiX given chip is supported. That's why people who want to know new architecture need to do much, much, much more digging than watching few meaningless gaming benchmarks.

GPUs are much more than just games. I game nearly all my life (given my age probably even too much, ME Legends and 4 is coming I'm freaking pumped!), but I never buy GPUs solely only for that. I want maximum bang for ludicrous $ I have to spend in say 5 year time window. On paper 3090 is only like 2.5x faster in games than my venerable 1080Tis. But on rendering performance in ray-traced supported engine performance goes through the roof. Single 3090 offer nearly 5x CUDA vs 1080Ti (in latest IRAY early optimized benchmarks and even bit more in OptiX). Enough said.

 

[Shawshanks]

Biggest F U if I ever saw one to Nvidia. HAHAHA well deserved.

 

[delakova]

Here is one of the problems. We the consumers are at fault. When we are willing to pay 1500.00 for a 3080 the company takes note of that and wants a piece of the action. Big Corporation s want to manipulate the public into buying what they want us to buy not in what we actually need to achieve what we want.
We as consumers need to be very careful before we are buying well wrapped manure and thinking that is filet Mignon. The act that Nvidia committed should not only be walked back they should be boycotted by us . They need to feel the pain of the little guy.

 

[MrGRiMv25]

Honestly, I wish you would focus on ray tracing more. Not everyone plays games with these cards... some of us creative types would like to know how things compare using something more than Blender which sucks at speedy renders of any real quality. Maya, Daz3D, 3D Studio, etc. users need good cards too... and are often willing to buy the high end because it saves an hour or ten per frame of rendering time.

I have one test render I use to compare cards. With a GTX 1050Ti it takes about 1.9 hours per frame (of a 30 second, 30 FPS video). How much improvement would I get from a RTX 3090? These are the questions I would like answered.

Tongue in cheek conclusion... this is TechSpot, not GameSpot. I personally would like more focus on the technology advantages, not just the gamer advantages.

If you want those types of reviews then may I suggest Phoronix, they do compute based reviews with no focus on gaming if that floats your boat.

 

[No Longer Human]

Boo hoo, big meanie NVIDIA won't send me a FE GPU to review so I think I deserve attn from the "community" for such disrespectful treatment as well.

I've seen this argument/sentiment in this thread so many times I will pick on you (sorry) so I only have to address it once. There is more than one issue, but I'll mention one. If 'reviewers' have to buy the cards on launch day, they are essentially out of business compared to the media that receive the info and the card ahead of launch day. All of this, it's implications (and more) are explained in the article and in the embedded video (Linus) if one reads, listens and comprehends.

 

[NightAntilli]

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

nVidia has been like this for at least a decade and a half.

 

[NightAntilli]

This **** is why I never have and never will trust hardware reviewers. At the end of the day, they are dependent upon free samples to do the reviews, which means that they are beholden to the supplier.

I'll wait for the scores to show up on Passmark and other public-participation benchmarking utilities.

The fact that this happened pretty much shows that Hardware Unboxed / Techspot can be trusted, because, they will speak up against the giant.

 

[pildorman321]

Good Nvidia GPUS: Tesla , Maxwell and Pascal. Fermi...Kepler...Volta...Turing...Ampere:
all total garbage, weaker rasterization each gen, higher tdps, higher prices, extra FORCED BS and useless gimmicks. I wont buy an nvidia gpu anymore, not unless they manage to produce an efficient / fast one.
(100w max tdp) with no ray tracing bullshit.