No publicity like bad publicity.
Nvidia has announced the end of its GeForce Partner Program. The program was, according to Nvidia, “designed to ensure that gamers have full transparency into the GPU platform and software they’re being sold, and can confidently select products that carry the NVIDIA GeForce promise.” But, as you might guess, if it had turned out that way, we wouldn’t be here right now.
The program, on surface level, was meant to incentivize Nvidia’s hardware partners to align their gaming brands up with Nvidia’s products. In turn, Nvidia would provide more marketing support and early access to some of its products. Nvidia stated that the program wasn’t exclusive, and partners could continue to sell whatever products they liked.
Not everyone bought that, however; Kyle Bennett from HardOCP did a little investigating, and found something interesting. After getting pointed in the right direction by AMD, Kyle found that the whole thing goes deeper after talking to a few of Nvidia’s potential partners. From what these companies were led to believe by the representatives they met, Nvidia might hold back on GPUs if they didn’t affiliate. Despite the fact that such a thing wasn’t in the strict, written terms of any agreement. From Kyle’s article:
What is disturbing is that we have been told that if a company does not participate in GPP, those companies feel as if NVIDIA would hold back allocation of GPUs from their inventories. From all we have talked to, the issue of not allocating GPU inventories to non-GPP partners have not been spelled out contractually, but is rather done on a wink and a nod.
As the news spread, AMD fired back under the banner of “Freedom of Choice“. Notably, however, AMD has a partnership with Asus going, branded Arez, since Asus’ Republic of Gamers line was going to be exclusive with GeForce.
Nvidia maintains their program’s stated goal, even after shuttering it.
A lot has been said recently about our GeForce Partner Program. The rumors, conjecture and mistruths go far beyond its intent. Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program.
GPP had a simple goal – ensuring that gamers know what they are buying and can make a clear choice.
[…]With GPP, we asked our partners to brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear. The choice of GPU greatly defines a gaming platform. So, the GPU brand should be clearly transparent – no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon.
Most partners agreed. They own their brands and GPP didn’t change that. They decide how they want to convey their product promise to gamers. Still, today we are pulling the plug on GPP to avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we’re doing to bring amazing advances to PC gaming.
Source: PC Gamer
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