The “transparent” yet shockingly secretive GeForce Partner Program from Nvidia is beginning to show its teeth in multiple ways, with clues starting to emerge that point to who the partners may be and what the potential ramifications are for AMD and its user base.
Let's do a quick recap of the GeForce Partner Program before we move forward. Nvidia states that for their partners who manufacture GeForce graphics cards, the program will provide social media promotions, engineering and marketing support and early access to new Nvidia GeForce technologies. They claim the program is "transparent" and beneficial to gamers.
HardOCP's Kyle Bennett recently published a report that contradicted this, citing conversations with 7 major players in the industry. Everyone he spoke to insisted the program may border on being illegal, will hurt consumer choice, and ultimately disrupt the business AMD has with these companies. For example, companies like MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS all have "Gaming" brands associated with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Why? Because Bennett claims to have seen documents that force these companies to align their gaming brand exclusively with Nvidia when joining the GeForce Partner Program.
This is a big deal, because it's the gaming brands for which marketing dollars are spent. It's where campaigns are forged to gain gamer mindshare.
Since publishing the story, all of Bennett's contacts have gone silent including Nvidia. My own follow-up to his investigation is stalled. I'd secured a commitment from a few companies to speak off the record, but they have also gone dark. Prior to that happening I had two brief conversations that made it obvious the program was troublesome, to put it mildly.
No one is going to talk about this thing for now, and you can draw your own conclusions as to why.
Well, to be fully transparent, I am not sure we are currently in a position to do any follow-up as NVIDIA has gone dark on GPP along with nearly every contact we have in the industry on this topic. Certainly we struck a nerve. Like the OEMs, I guess cutting off $ hits home.
— [H]ardOCP.com (@HardOCP) March 19, 2018
Speaking of those very same companies, today a Reddit thread was posted claiming that Nvidia's GPP had claimed its "first victim." It also linked to various Amazon and Newegg pages which, to me, resembled more of a possible database error than an outright blackout of Gaming-branded Radeon cards. I searched for products like "MSI Gaming RX 580" and "ASUS Strix 580" and had no issues finding in-stock listings. No apparent foul play there.
However, this prompted me to actually check ASUS and MSI's official websites. Nothing out of the ordinary happening over at Asus.com, as there are plenty of ASUS ROG Strix listings for Radeon cards.
When viewing the MSI products page for AMD GPUs, however, their "Gaming X" branded Radeon cards are conspicuously absent. All that remains are reference versions of Polaris 500 series and Vega cards, or MSI's "Armor" lineup. That's beyond interesting.
Adding fuel to the fire is a new oddity from Gigabyte concerning their AORUS gaming brand. The company had previously released two external GPU enclosures (boxes you can attach via Thunderbolt 3 to certain laptops or other underpowered PCs to enable desktop-class gaming). These were called "AORUS GTX 1080 Gaming Box" and "AORUS GTX 1070 Gaming Box." They include the specified cards.
This week Gigabyte released one for the Radeon RX 580. It is simply called "RX 580 Gaming Box." No AORUS branding is present on the box or the product itself. It's the only perceivable difference. Is this the beginning of that exclusive alignment? Maybe, maybe not. It's not strong evidence, but it is evidence. And more will come.
UPDATE: Gigabyte tells ComputerBase.de that this product does not have AORUS branding because it is "not gamer focused." That's interesting because this is their product page:
In my eyes this is cause for concern. Nvidia claims the GPP is transparent. Being transparent doesn't mean silently removing a gaming brand that your community has associated you with. Transparency does mean Nvidia actually telling people who their partners are. Here's to hoping that these companies do communicate with their users about the future of their Nvidia and AMD graphics cards.
It should only take a matter of weeks to see if Gigabyte and MSI's gaming-branded Radeon cards slip away from retail and fall into obscurity after stock is depleted. I sure hope I'm wrong, but I suspect this is just the beginning.
