NVIDIA Controls AIB Launch and Driver Distribution @ [H]

Jon855 said:
Since I do not know the exact number of registered members on this site, let us assume that [H] has one million registered members...

At this time the total tally of the Yes and No is at;
Yes - 414 ~33%
No - 848 ~66%

Total Votes - 1262

Assuming a confidence level of 95% the Margin Error would be only ~ +/-3% this tells us by a quite WIDE margin that the people (members of this community) agree with the NO vote.

And as for that member with 1,000,001 posts, etc... That's Kyle's own SON and he's a honorary member, these are fiction post counts and such. You ask how does he have the time to live? I'll tell you how - He BEAT CANCER!
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I love it when people actually understand inferential statistics! There are way too few of us.
 
renz496 said:
In the past this might be true. But right now the most money coming from the high end segment even if the segment does not have the most volume. JPR report for gaming hardware revenue for 2016 show that most of the revenue generated by high end hardware sales. Even AMD admit this openly in their presentation. That's why Frontier Edition exist.
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I e could argue that the reason this is the case is because AMD has competitive products in the mid range. When there is competition it drives down margins and thus less money is made.

I'm betting the only reason Nvidia is making more money from high end parts than from the mid range is because there is no competition in the high end, and thus they can raise their margins.

There used to also be good high volume money in the very low end, but APU's and iGPU's put am end to that...
 
PhoenixWings said:
I wonder what it would take for the SEC to launch a probe into NVIDIA. Or maybe this is something more up the FTCs alley. After all, this isn't exactly Apple, so they might not get gentle treatmebt if caught in either of these departments crosshairs.

Anti-consumer behaviour, stock price manipulation by paper-launching a new product, forcimg their AIBs to eat 10-series inventory to bolster revenue numbers.

Maybe one of the best and brightest here can answer the following questions:

Is NVIDIAs behaviour outright illegal or just unethical? Where do we draw the line?
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NVIDIA's behavior is neither unlawful nor unethical. Conduct you don't like != illegal or unethical.

That said, the conduct is, at best, bizarre. Really not clear why NVIDIA is taking these actions or what it thinks they will accomplish.
 
verylostindeed said:
NVIDIA's behavior is neither unlawful nor unethical. Conduct you don't like != illegal or unethical.

That said, the conduct is, at best, bizarre. Really not clear why NVIDIA is taking these actions or what it thinks they will accomplish.
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They want to prevent reviewing by those with clearly anti-Nvidia agendas, ie, AdoredTV or other sites/channels that do well on bad mouthing Nvidia and who generate lot of views or clicks doing so.
 
amenx said:
They want to prevent reviewing by those with clearly anti-Nvidia agendas, ie, AdoredTV or other sites/channels that do well on bad mouthing Nvidia and who generate lot of views or clicks doing so.
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An outside observer might call that being corporately responsible. Purposefully generating negative press that affects stock prices may be illegal, but it's certainly a potential cause for legal action by shareholders.

[I know I'm reaching]
 
Looks like I’ll just go ahead and see what the 7nm cards look like from AMD. Get myself a Freesync monitor, save myself hundreds of dollars in the process.
 
Brahmzy said:
Once nV got both feet firmly planted in Data Center compute, it’s was all over.
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My god.

Nothing is 'all over'. Nvidia is providing solutions that no one else provides. Let the competition come. Really!

Brahmzy said:
Once this started happening for nV, and nV alone, I foresaw all of this crap coming to the gaming side.
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All companies wish to protect their product lines, their imaging, their press, and most certainly their revenue. That is what business is.

Again, Nvidia is far from alone here. They're aggressive, we must give them that, but that isn't inherently a fault. They know that for the moment in the GPU space, AMD has chosen to cede ground. AMD isn't really their worry; they only almost catch up every few years.

But with ray tracing and Intel throwing their hat into the ring?

That behemoth bearing down on them has to keep Chairman Huang up at night.
 
Lets hope intel can develop something big in the GPU space. Let’s hope Epyc becomes a massive force to be reckoned with and gets some presence / market share with some staying power.
 
I think NDA free has some real memetic and market value.
Felt like a little fun before stapling caved roof tiles back up ;)
nda free JH.jpg
 
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I bet that the 399.07 drivers out for Battlefield V already have the RTX stuff in them...

As far as the founders edition goes, it's good that they are overclocking, but I suspect they are still price inflated on purpose, as to not cut too deeply into AIB sales.

Just wait for reviews plus AIB cards. We will know more, and if these are amazing, likely have cheaper choices to pick from. (Or not, just remembered that there were some asus 2080Ti's for preorder at the same price point. Maybe they are just doing the same thing nVidia was doing, early adopter tax).
 
Vader1975 said:
I have bought 3. But quite abit longer ago. One is in my Mac Pro. I changed the thermal compound on all 3 cards and performance improved immediately. They had this ultrathick crumbly grey paste that was way to thick. My thermals improved quite abit and it stays clocked higher. I also upped my fan speeds by default abit and now they really run well. I considered water but I don't think the cost is worth it given how well they are running. Just a thought :)
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I went with watercooling just to keep fan noise to a minimum.
 
micgre8162 said:
I especially dislike the part where NVIDIA gets to choose their reviewers. It suggests to me that I won't be able to trust the objectivity of ANY review on launch day, unless the reviewer has purchased the card with his own money. I could understand a company wanting to know who's reviewing a product so that they can provide the info to their PR and tech people in case of questions or issues, but this doesn't appear to be that. This is just a ham-fisted attempt to ensure positive reviews.
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Nvidia can’t choose or limit who reviews their cards. Anyone can buy a card and publish a review. What nvidia can and should control is who gets free pre-release samples for review and there are many reasons why they would want to do so. We know that AIBs in Asia are leaky as hell so it actually makes perfect sense that nvidia wants to control delivery of drivers to people that are trusted to keep it in their pants until release date. Kyle is spinning it as heavy handed but we know from experience what happens once drivers and hardware are out in the wild. I honestly don’t see the problem with controlling access to free hardware and pre-release software. Maybe I’m just not as wary of the corporate boogeyman as I should be.

There has been a lot of paranoid speculation and suspicion over this, some of it justifiable, but no evidence that nvidia is hand picking “friendly” reviewers. That particular conspiracy theory is strange to me as pretty much all the major review sites are considered professional and trustworthy and call things as they are.

As Kyle mentioned there is a difference between a reviewer and a journalist. Journalists do not need and should not accept free samples in order to their jobs. Can’t have it both ways.
 
You're correct that NVIDIA can't control who reviews their products after launch, but people who can get the products earlier and get their reviews out sooner stand a better chance of earning more revenue from their videos. People who are late to the show will earn less because those videos will have fewer viewers, since the immediate excitement of a new product is gone.

NVIDIA has used ringers in the past to generate misleading positive reviews of their products, and they were caught. By taking a list of reviewers provided by AIBs and then winnowing it to specific reviewers who will receive review samples, they are either actively attempting to control the review message in order to receive favorable reviews or they're giving the strong indication of doing that. After all, if they're choosing reviewers from a list provided by AIBs, what is their criteria? How are they deciding who gets review samples? Are they drawing names randomly out of a hat or is it a more controlled process? What characteristics are they looking for in reviewers in order to make the final cut?

As I said, based on NVIDIA's past behavior, I'm deeply suspicious of what they're doing this time.
 
I’m not familiar with the ringers that you mentioned but I don’t follow the YouTube scene. The major websites are pretty widely respected and trusted.

Anytime a company tries to control “anything” it breeds suspicion but there are a lot of reasonable non-nefarious reasons why they would keep a steady hand over launch proceedings.
 
jnemesh said:
I went with watercooling just to keep fan noise to a minimum.
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I do hear the fans but it isn't bad. I used to run 470's in Quad SLI with modified bios's that had the fans at 100% all day long.. now that sounded like a hairdryer lol.
 
micgre8162 said:
Elric Phares over at Tech of Tomorrow disagrees with you, but I don't think he's reading the NDA as closely as your lawyer.
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Heck, he may even not be reading what I wrote......Of course, not reading is the backbone of Youtube....so you go that.

"For a reviewer to have access, he must first sign NVIDIA's multi-year NDA (which is fine if you are "just" a card reviewer),"
 
MangoSeed said:
I’m not familiar with the ringers that you mentioned but I don’t follow the YouTube scene. The major websites are pretty widely respected and trusted.
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That happened about ten years back. Wasn't just NVIDIA either. ATI (AMD Radeon) was doing similar stuff, paying for reviews and cooking benchmarks to skew performance metrics.

MangoSeed said:
Anytime a company tries to control “anything” it breeds suspicion but there are a lot of reasonable non-nefarious reasons why they would keep a steady hand over launch proceedings.
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Sure, they could have perfectly innocent reasons, totally harmless, but with most companies, and companies such as Microsoft and NVIDIA in particular, it's best to err on the side of skepticism. I'm not suggesting they're a bunch of untrustworthy bastards who'll sell you out for the price of bus fare to the next stop... but they're a bunch of untrustworthy bastards looking for some bus fare.
 
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JulianCA said:
Getting PREVIEWS of anything is a privilege. No one is stopping anyone from reviewing the cards with official drivers once they are on the actual market. Think about what this article is really saying: "I deserve the right to get a sneak peak". A launch is a company's own party and they should be welcome to invite anyone they want. If they want an exclusive soiree that makes us all resentful, that's their call.

Now, I do think that being exclusive and pricey and cagey are not the greatest of behaviors and can breed suspicion and resentment. I totally understand that. But people gotta put their outrage in perspective. Having preview access to the launch of a luxury item is a privilege -- simple as that.

And I want to emphasize that these are a LUXURY item. No one needs one. There is no rush to buy one. NVIDIA has the right to put an asking price of a million dollars if they want. The only thing making people all anxious is vanity and greed -- people are literally whining about the fact that something that didn't exist a year ago is not that affordable today! First world problem...
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While i agree with you, many people who buys those cards does not have this notion as clear, seems that the relativization of those practices plus the main target audience is the perfect niche for pushing this "agenda".
I have seen some documentaries of how easy is to make people normalize certain behaviours at lower age, like lying, robbing, etc... We as humans can quickly adapt to the new rules, or aparent rules, when the behaviour seems widely practiced and accepted.
In this case those cards are bought mainly by adolecents and half grown up adults, while adults in general are not the main target, some buy it, but their moral compass is more grounded.
WIth youtube influencers (Disguised as reviewers) all around the globe, showing that they have it, and justifying that you should buy it, it starts like a domino effect, and suddenly it becames the new norm, it happened with the 900 series, 1000 series and again 2000, nvidia will push as far as they can.
We are responsbile as well for our world, like Spider-man's quote meant "The bigger the power, the bigger the responsability"
As we have this "power" we have higher "responsability" to guide our brothers, because in the end we will pay the higher price as well.
 
The biggest thing that bothers me about nvidia is how they have literally created a fake MSRP price. I mean its the biggest rip off I have ever seen. Why would AIBs create aftermarket card and price them lower than nvidia founders edition? Makes no sense. ITs a way of inflating prices. I am sure AIBs love it. But Nvidia at the end is profiting from it too. You won't find the blower edition TI's for a while. I mean good luck. I am sure Nvidia will just drop the price by 200 of founder edition in 6-8 months and call it a day lol. I mean now msrp is not available for 6 months after launch. But hey the price is 999 doesn't matter if you can't find it. that is the base price lol.
 
NVIDIA claimed that their increased MSRP was due to an increase in material costs, namely GDDR5. I don't know if that's still true with GDDR6. I know there's an active class action lawsuit against Micron, Hynix, and Samsung alleging they colluded to artificially decrease DRAM supply in order to raise prices. I thought that referred specifically to RAM only, but if GDDR memory was also artificially inflated, then that could account for some of NVIDIA's increased costs. I also remember reading a while back that Apple and Samsung had arrangements with TSMC and other foundries for first dibs on GDDR for their phones, which could also account for increased costs. Big as we think NVIDIA is, they're nowhere near the size of Apple or Samsung.

I thought the way NVIDIA went about adjusting their MSRPs was odd, but I understood their reasoning, given the market conditions at the time. The question we should ask now is, do those conditions still prevail?
 
micgre8162 said:
NVIDIA claimed that their increased MSRP was due to an increase in material costs, namely GDDR5. I don't know if that's still true with GDDR6. I know there's an active class action lawsuit against Micron, Hynix, and Samsung alleging they colluded to artificially decrease DRAM supply in order to raise prices. I thought that referred specifically to RAM only, but if GDDR memory was also artificially inflated, then that could account for some of NVIDIA's increased costs. I also remember reading a while back that Apple and Samsung had arrangements with TSMC and other foundries for first dibs on GDDR for their phones, which could also account for increased costs. Big as we think NVIDIA is, they're nowhere near the size of Apple or Samsung.

I thought the way NVIDIA went about adjusting their MSRPs was odd, but I understood their reasoning, given the market conditions at the time. The question we should ask now is, do those conditions still prevail?
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Doesn’t matter. That is not even the question. Make one msrp. If it’s costing you more to build don’t make this shadow msrp of 999 and you can’t find a card for 999 for 6 months or more. Just say 1199 and drop it later when you want.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
There is no such thing.

Nvidia is the 'M' in MSRP. They can make it anything they damn well please.
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Well. I wasn’t trying to be technical lol. I am not going to sit here and make exsuces for Nvidia making up a phantom msrp that you don’t see for 6+ months if ever. Why not just say hey here is the price we are launching with. Not say 999 and then best price you find is 1199 for God knows how long.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
They make the GPU.
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I really can’t believe you are justifying it for nvidia. They make great cards, yes. But their msrp crap is bullshit. They started it with pascal. You know exactly what we are trying to state but I can’t wrap my head around you actually think they are not in charge of it lol. Only thing I am questioning is why mention a price that no one will find? Is that like perfectly fine? Didn’t used to be that way until nvidia started this founders edition pricing crap. I am fine with them charging whatever they want but don’t give me plaster it all over your presentation. 999 when the card is actually 1199. They are pushing the msrp but no one can buy it at that price. Lol. Great!
 
Cards will eventually settle at MSRP (or lower). Launch prices are always higher due to limited stocks and fanatical demand for new products and etailer scalpers.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Yeah, and what do you buy as a consumer? a naked GPU die? No, you buy a graphics card, which includes the GPU, which the AIB buys from NV :p
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Of all of the components on a graphics card, the GPU is 99% of the innovation. The AIBs are just gluing them together, and they're following Nvidia's reference designs on release.

I'm recognizing that graphics cards based with Nvidia GPUs are initially based entirely on Nvidia's work, and Nvidia's right to charge what they see fit.

And pointing out the tantrums evidenced here that appear to be vacant of market understanding.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Yeah, and what do you buy as a consumer? a naked GPU die? No, you buy a graphics card, which includes the GPU, which the AIB buys from NV :p
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Not sure if you’re joking but nvidia provides almost 100% of the value of a graphics card. Of course they will control pricing. It’s their brand and their tech.
 
amenx said:
Cards will eventually settle at MSRP (or lower). Launch prices are always higher due to limited stocks and fanatical demand for new products and etailer scalpers.
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Lol. Wasn’t the case when there was no founders edition tax. Before msrp and the aib cards will have 100 or so premium. Now all aib cards are 1250. Above founders edition card. What is their incentive to actually undercut founders edition? None! They are treating it as base price. Next time when nvidia announces founders edition ti that is +300, aib after market cards will be +350. Name of the game. Msrp can wait. Milk the fanboys.
 
NKD said:
Lol. Wasn’t the case when there was no founders edition tax. Before msrp and the aib cards will have 100 or so premium. Now all aib cards are 1250. Above founders edition card. What is their incentive to actually undercut founders edition? None! They are treating it as base price. Next time when nvidia announces founders edition ti that is +300, aib after market cards will be +350. Name of the game. Msrp can wait. Milk the fanboys.
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According to nowinstock Amazon has a shitty blower for $999. Also there’s a ton of AIBs at $1169.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Of all of the components on a graphics card, the GPU is 99% of the innovation. The AIBs are just gluing them together, and they're following Nvidia's reference designs on release.

I'm recognizing that graphics cards based with Nvidia GPUs are initially based entirely on Nvidia's work, and Nvidia's right to charge what they see fit.

And pointing out the tantrums evidenced here that appear to be vacant of market understanding.
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No I think the problem is nvidia started making their own cards at a higher premium than msrp. I got no problem with them charging 1200 msrp. Just say so. My problem is don’t make a reference card 200 above msrp Becaue now AIBs have no incentive to price their After market cards below founders edition. That is on nvidia. Before we would see after market cards starting at 50 or so above msrp and up from there. Just because of founders edition it’s +200 and above for after market cards.
 
NKD said:
No I think the problem is nvidia started making their own cards at a higher premium than msrp. I got no problem with them charging 1200 msrp. Just say so. My problem is don’t make a reference card 200 above msrp Becaue now AIBs have no incentive to price their After market cards below founders edition. That is on nvidia. Before we would see after market cards starting at 50 or so above msrp and up from there. Just because of founders edition it’s +200 and above for after market cards.
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You’re choosing to only see it in the most negative way possible. Another option is that if the founders edition open air cooler is competitive with the best AIBs have to offer then it will increase demand for FE and lower demand for AIB cards.

Net result? Lower prices on AIB cards between MSRP and FE.
 
Dayaks said:
According to nowinstock Amazon has a shitty blower for $999. Also there’s a ton of AIBs at $1169.
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That wont be coming in stock for a while lol! Nothing in stock. Most of the ones I have seen in stock are the 1249 models. I think 1169 models probably wont be in for a bit. Word is nvidia is focusing on the 2080 for now.
 
MangoSeed said:
You’re choosing to only see it in the most negative way possible. Another option is that if the founders edition open air cooler is competitive with the best AIBs have to offer then it will increase demand for FE and lower demand for AIB cards.

Net result? Lower prices on AIB cards between MSRP and FE.
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lol. I am not negative. I don't know since when it became okay to announce msrp and then you have to wait 6 months to find a card at that price. I doubt nvidia is doing it out of goodness of their heart. If Nvidia was that nice and they wanted to create cheaper cards they would have made the price cheaper lol. Trust me its not their goal to sell less founders edition cards and create more competition.
 
Founder's Edition (or, as I like to say, Fuck you Edition) pricing was exhaustively discussed and dissected back when Pascal was introduced. For quite some time after launch you were lucky to see any card in the lineups that went for under the FE price. I felt I was lucky to score a AIB card under the FE price a few months after the release of Pascal.

AIBs have no incentive to price below what nVidia itself sells for. If an AIB has a greater perceived value than nVidia's 'reference' card it's going to sell for more despite what the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price is set to.
 
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