Friday, January 27th 2012
NVIDIA Engaged in PsyOps Against HD 7970: Chinese Forum
A lot has been said about NVIDIA's upcoming product with which it will compete against AMD's Radeon HD 7900 series, except of course, pictures, benchmarks, and so on. Chinese tech forum ChipHell accused NVIDIA of deploying shills across forums to shape public opinion about the already-launched HD 7900 series, towards waiting for NVIDIA's competitive product, these include blind talk about imaginary performance superiority, killer price, etc.
Chinese forums have recognized patterns in this spurt of anti-AMD and pro-HD 7970 imaginary-competitor product posts and banned scores of user accounts engaged in this activity. There's a very potent reason why ChipHell's observations shouldn't be met with cynicism, or made light of. In China, competing factions in the ever-ruling Communist party have been known to use what is known as "the 50 cent army", where for a pittance, scores of internet forum posters can be engaged to perform coordinated PsyOps, to shape public opinion, and maintain public support. It is only natural, then, that competing companies in the extremely competitive Chinese domestic market resort to similar tactics, including those distributing NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, or, as Chip Hell alleges, NVIDIA itself.
Source:
HardOCP
Chinese forums have recognized patterns in this spurt of anti-AMD and pro-HD 7970 imaginary-competitor product posts and banned scores of user accounts engaged in this activity. There's a very potent reason why ChipHell's observations shouldn't be met with cynicism, or made light of. In China, competing factions in the ever-ruling Communist party have been known to use what is known as "the 50 cent army", where for a pittance, scores of internet forum posters can be engaged to perform coordinated PsyOps, to shape public opinion, and maintain public support. It is only natural, then, that competing companies in the extremely competitive Chinese domestic market resort to similar tactics, including those distributing NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, or, as Chip Hell alleges, NVIDIA itself.
112 Comments on NVIDIA Engaged in PsyOps Against HD 7970: Chinese Forum
Of course the fact they could do it, doesn't make it any true, but then again the same goes for Nvidia. The only thing that I've seen so far is a bunch of people have been banned. And since we are talking about people being bought, the admin of Chiphell could as easily been bought as anyone else. Since when is Chiphell a trusty site anyway? They said Kepler was 384 bit, just to say 256 bit the next day, no hot-clocks one day, yes to hot-clocks the other. To me this means nothing really. From what I read in Asia every company does this guerrlla marketing, if it's true that the Chiphell members were working for Nvidia that only means they got caught and the ones from other comanies have not been caught (yet), not that it is something extraordinary that is only made by Nvidia. It's as relevant as saying that politicians lie.
* or info that cannot be verified.
If we talk about performance per dollar, at 1200p, the GTX580 actually has an advatage, because the AMD cards have their prices very much inflated, especially in Europe, and you pay a lot more for that 12% performance advatage.
The same HD7970 is about 50% faster then the current mid-range NVIDIA GPU, the GTX560 Ti (vanilla, not the special edition 448 core) at the same 1200p resolution. I'm not going to say how much more bang for the buck you get with the GTX560 Ti because it's embarrasing for the AMD card.
This is all according to TPU.
What I'm wondering now, it's how much performance do people expect for the GK104 card priced at $300 to warrant all this distrust. What do people expect the performance of the GK104 card (GTX660, GTX760 or whatever it's name will be) to be in relation to the GTX560 Ti?
It's clear that GK104 should outperform a GTX560 Ti. Let's say it's ~30% better. Well that puts it in GTX580 territory. For almost half the price of an HD7970. All of a sudden the HD7970 costs ~100% more for just ~15% more performance.
I'm sorry, but paying double for just a bit of extra performance contradicts the AMD customer charta. This is what kept AMD alive for so long, in the CPU and GPU markets. You don't have to have the fastest CPU/GPU as long as you price it correctly to make it attractive. AMD already f@#&d that up with Bulldozer. So they're on a destructive pricing curve.
And you can adjust that 30% and downplay it to 25% or 20%. But that's not realistic. A new card should outperform it's predecesor by at least 30%. It's just how it is.
What makes it a nightmare for AMD is that this is their top GPU, their "enthusiast chip", their high-end, while GK104 is NVIDIA's "performance chip", or mid-range GPU.
So whatever you read about AMD or NVIDIA right now, apart from being a fabrication and a complete joke, is rendered nil if you just stop for a moment and think about it. Take your fanboi hat off for a minute and do some simple math. You can do some aproximations, I don't mind. Percentages in the single digits will always fall prey to erosion due to driver updates.
consumerist.com/2006/02/nvidia-focus-group-member-details-hidden-program.html
Ofc AMD will lower their somewhat ridiculous prices when Nvidia launches their next gen, but the current prices are based on the performance vs current top NVidia cards, not on production costs. Combined with catering to the people for whom money is no object as long as they have the newest of the newest.
And if Nvidia is really owning em in performance with their also virtual top segment, we'll see a 7990 at current 7970 price or the 8xxx series within max 12~15 months, as that seems to be the current development speed per generation
Nvidia won't loose a penny anyway. It's probably been long (months) since Nvidia sold the last GTX580. Retailers and partners still selling cards are probably just cleaning their stock. Until March/April there's lots of time too and AMD only helped by not really competing with HD7970 on the same price bracket.
Nvidia might even be giving partners/retailers some extra time when they said they would not paper launch it, giving them a good "extra" month.
Intel also has a way more dominant relationship with their partners/retailers as you well know. Nvidia cant afford those kinda practises towards their retailers and certainly not towards their partners, the bargaining position of Nvidia is a lot more delicate then Intels.
So it's not entirely one way traffic, and I wouldn't see AMD (or Intel etc) being able to claim the moral high ground in the viral/guerilla marketing arena.
7970 £420-516
580 £357-394
That isnt a huge gap.
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0Ke8RecIqZUJ:www.overclock.net/t/1205407/chiphell-keep-it-classy-nvidia-viral-marketing-discovered-at-chiphell-kepler-rumors-debunked/10+nvidia+keep+it+classy&cd=2&hl=sl&ct=clnk&gl=si&client=firefox-a
use " /xx " for page number
without = 1 page
/10 = 2 page
/40 = 5 page
I don't know why it throws on the second page , at first it did work ... it's a FF/ google bug somehow knowing that i already visited the page and makes werid things so i pasted this url.
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Nice to see my name color matches my Avatar, too. :roll: