I enjoyed this rant.

[ENTERPRISE]

Not sure about you guys but I enjoyed the Linus rant at Nvidia with respect to the letter they sent to Hardware Unboxed which was basically a straight up threat focusing on no longer sending them reference cards for review. 

 

For anyone who missed it.....

 

 

[Andrew]

We are just talking about that right now

[ENTERPRISE]

10 hours ago, Andrew said:

We are just talking about that right now

 

Nice !

[schuck6566]

The entire time I was like,THANK-U! Somebody else who sees this the way I do!

[UltraMega]

I hate to say I feel a little conflicted by this. While it's basically a dick move, it's entirely within Nvidia's rights to control their own marketing. As a gamer/consumer, I really don't care if I see a review a few days before or after new cards come out. Considering how hard it is to ever get new graphics cards, it's not like early reviews even matter fur 99% of consumers. I get that if you're a youtuber who relies on beating others to the punch with video uploads for your income then it's a pretty lame situation to be in but it's not Nvidia's job to make life easy for youtubers. If the hardware unboxed guy was a marketing rep for Nvidia and he wasn't pushing the new features of their product, they would surely fire him. I don't see why providing early samples would be any different. Nothing is stopping anyone buying the graphics card themselves. 

 

It seems fairly obvious that early reviews for any product will be skewed and the real lesson here is that early review are a bad practice in the industry overall. 

 

No argument that it's lame for Nvidia to do this but it doesn't really bother me either. The way I see if, people who get early samples are basically entering into a transaction with Nvidia that has an understood mutual benifit. If that relationship doesn't properly benifit one party, they have no reason to maintain the relationship. Providing them with something of value that they can use to make money is not all that different from sending them a check directly to me, so I just look at it as if Nvidia fired a marketing rep. 

 

A lot of youtubers do this, make a huge deal about something that really only impact them and try to get their audience to care about it as if they have all been greatly injured, but it's just not reality in this case. Nvidia could stop sending early samples to anyone and in wouldn't change a damn thing for anyone except the people who did early reviews. There are times where companies need to be kept in check with public attention, but this isn't it.

Edited December 15, 2020 by UltraMega

[schuck6566]

2 hours ago, UltraMega said:

I hate to say I feel a little conflicted by this. While it's basically a dick move, it's entirely within Nvidia's rights to control their own marketing. As a gamer/consumer, I really don't care if I see a review a few days before or after new cards come out. Considering how hard it is to ever get new graphics cards, it's not like early reviews even matter fur 99% of consumers. I get that if you're a youtuber who relies on beating others to the punch with video uploads for your income then it's a pretty lame situation to be in but it's not Nvidia's job to make life easy for youtubers. If the hardware unboxed guy was a marketing rep for Nvidia and he wasn't pushing the new features of their product, they would surely fire him. I don't see why providing early samples would be any different. Nothing is stopping anyone buying the graphics card themselves. 

 

It seems fairly obvious that early reviews for any product will be skewed and the real lesson here is that early review are a bad practice in the industry overall. 

 

No argument that it's lame for Nvidia to do this but it doesn't really bother me either. The way I see if, people who get early samples are basically entering into a transaction with Nvidia that has an understood mutual benifit. If that relationship doesn't properly benifit one party, they have no reason to maintain the relationship. Providing them with something of value that they can use to make money is not all that different from sending them a check directly to me, so I just look at it as if Nvidia fired a marketing rep. 

 

A lot of youtubers do this, make a huge deal about something that really only impact them and try to get their audience to care about it as if they have all been greatly injured, but it's just not reality in this case. Nvidia could stop sending early samples to anyone and in wouldn't change a damn thing for anyone except the people who did early reviews. There are times where companies need to be kept in check with public attention, but this isn't it.

I haven't heard ANYONE say nvidia didn't have the right to say who could and who couldn't get the early release cards for review. I think what pretty much pissed off everyone was Nvidia closing the letter by saying that if they changed their "editorial direction" nvidia would be open to restoring them to the receiving list of F.E. cards.

Seriously,are they gonna start doing that to everyone who writes a bad revue about 1 of their cards?You can't say this isn't making people wonder if they'll start doing that,or even worse,if they're only sending cards out now to the people they KNOW will revue the way they want the card to look? These were my FIRST thoughts when I heard the email that was sent.That,and "I wonder how long they've been thinning the herd?" EDIT: BTW, these 2 screenshots show how PR people try to recover from a screwup,even to blaming the covid lockdown. Short letter is 1st email apology,2nd is follow up.

Edited December 16, 2020 by schuck6566

[UltraMega]

People can be pissed but the bottom line is this doesn't change anything for consumers unless there are people out there who judge their purchases solely based on pre release reviews. If there are people out there that foolish then they deserve to be separated with their money.

[Minotaurtoo]

I tend to agree with the angry mob here, not one of them, but still I see their point...

 

1. If the first reviews are unfairly skewed in a companies favor due to pressure from the company, it will create a false sense of "awesomeness" around whatever new hardware is being released... and it can take hundreds of fair reviews before that initial opinion formed can be dampened... and of coarse the fanboys will never lose the false review based love of the new product... those of us in the know, know better than to believe the day one reviews and also know to read/watch many reviews before forming an opinion...

 

2. Reviewers may actually skew the other way out of fear of being accused of being shills or "toting the line" thus making products look less interesting than they actually are... this happened with AMD once that I remember, but for a slightly different reason.

 

While I'm not a part of the angry mob, I can see their reason for being so angry, especially those with livelihood based on reviewing hardware that they now have to be concerned over people assuming that they've been bought out. 

[ENTERPRISE]

3 hours ago, Minotaurtoo said:

I tend to agree with the angry mob here, not one of them, but still I see their point...

 

1. If the first reviews are unfairly skewed in a companies favor due to pressure from the company, it will create a false sense of "awesomeness" around whatever new hardware is being released... and it can take hundreds of fair reviews before that initial opinion formed can be dampened... and of coarse the fanboys will never lose the false review based love of the new product... those of us in the know, know better than to believe the day one reviews and also know to read/watch many reviews before forming an opinion...

 

2. Reviewers may actually skew the other way out of fear of being accused of being shills or "toting the line" thus making products look less interesting than they actually are... this happened with AMD once that I remember, but for a slightly different reason.

 

While I'm not a part of the angry mob, I can see their reason for being so angry, especially those with livelihood based on reviewing hardware that they now have to be concerned over people assuming that they've been bought out. 

 

I think some companies really do forget that new media is usually a full time job and a livelihood, not just a small something they do after work lol

[schuck6566]

18 hours ago, UltraMega said:

People can be pissed but the bottom line is this doesn't change anything for consumers unless there are people out there who judge their purchases solely based on pre release reviews. If there are people out there that foolish then they deserve to be separated with their money.

Hmmm,without pre release reviews,how are ALL the people who crashed Nvidia's site for the RTX 3080 launch (just as an example)supposed to know that's the card they want? Maybe they'd wait for the RX6900XT if it had been available early enough to preview before the 3080 launch? You can't say there AREN'T people out there who buy on day1, or even pre order when possible. Look @ xbox and PS5 pre order sales just for an example. Sadly,the common consumer doesn't seem to spend alot of time researching hardware anymore,it's a case of wanting the newest,brightest,as soon as possible.Why else would consumers have bought the first gen RTX 2xxx series,replaced it with the RTX 2xxx Super,then moved to the RTX 3xxx? We all know someone in that category of buyer.If it's latest version they want it.

Maybe you want them to base their purchase choice just on what the manufacturer releases to the public? We went that route already with the GTX 970 having 4Gb of high speed ram.(Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. The class action suits in question were brought against the company almost immediately after NVIDIA made the important (and more than a bit painful) disclosure that the initially published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong. Specifically, that the card had an unusual memory crossbar organization where one ROP/L2 partition was disabled, giving the card only 56 ROPs instead of 64. Furthermore, this meant that the last 512MB of the standard 4GB of VRAM could not be accessed in a contiguous manner, impacting how it could be used.)

But,no one would bother ck'n out reviewers.......

LOL, maybe we should just agree to disagree on this one.

 

Edited December 16, 2020 by schuck6566

[UltraMega]

3 minutes ago, schuck6566 said:

Hmmm,without pre release reviews,how are ALL the people who crashed Nvidia's site for the RTX 3080 launch (just as an example)supposed to know that's the card they want? Maybe they'd wait for the RX6900XT if it had been available early enough to preview before the 3080 launch? You can't say there AREN'T people out there who buy on day1, or even pre order when possible. Look @ xbox and PS5 pre order sales just for an example. Sadly,the common consumer doesn't seem to spend alot of time researching hardware anymore,it's a case of wanting the newest,brightest,as soon as possible.Why else would consumers have bought the first gen RTX 2xxx series,replaced it with the RTX 2xxx Super,then moved to the RTX 3xxx? We all know someone in that category of buyer.If it's latest version they want it.

Maybe you want them to base their purchase choice just on what the manufacturer releases to the public? We went that route already with the GTX 970 having 4Gb of high speed ram.(Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. The class action suits in question were brought against the company almost immediately after NVIDIA made the important (and more than a bit painful) disclosure that the initially published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong. Specifically, that the card had an unusual memory crossbar organization where one ROP/L2 partition was disabled, giving the card only 56 ROPs instead of 64. Furthermore, this meant that the last 512MB of the standard 4GB of VRAM could not be accessed in a contiguous manner, impacting how it could be used.)

But,no one would bother ck'n out reviewers.......

LOL, maybe we should just agree to disagree on this one.

 

I think the common consumer is quite patient actually. The vast majority of people wait a good while after new GPUs come out to upgrade, and they will look up reviews when they are ready to upgrade. I know a lot of PC gamers and none of them buy into early hype from Nvidia. 

[schuck6566]

I'll just say this, on Amazon,no cards are available @ list price in the RTX 3xxx series, on Newegg, out of 3 pages of cards in that series, ONE card was available from a 3rd party seller for $500.00 over the MSRP listing @ PNY.  The vast majority may wait,but you still have a load who buy as soon as they're available. We ALL know people who know what they're doing,unfortunately there are a lot more people who read the box trying to figure if it's better than what their kid already has,or they ask the sales person(shudders)who just directs them towards a more expensive card. Perfect example,when my friend got his comp & we were looking for a used card for it,I suggested a GTX 1060 with 6Gb of memory cause he doesn't game,but if he decides to it would handle older games fine,& even newer games on lower settings. We were having trouble finding 1 so he was gonna get one with 3Gb of memory(cause he'd probably never use all that memory anyway lol) so I had to explain that it had a less powerful processor in it & that was part of the reason we were going with the 6Gb card,for the more powerful gpu also. He was like "but aren't they both the same since they're 1060's??" I just shook my head and said it's Nvidia and they do that 2 people.

Not everyone ck's as deep as they should.