Friday, March 9th 2018
NVIDIA's New GPP Program Reportedly Engages in Monopolistic Practices
A report from HardOCP's Kyle Bennet aims to shake NVIDIA's foundations, with allegations of anti-competitive business practices under its new GeForce Partner Program (GPP). In his report, which started with an AMD approach that pushed him to look a little closer into GPP, Bennet says that he has found evidence that NVIDIA's new program aims to push partners towards shunning products from other hardware manufacturers - mainly AMD, with a shoot across the bow for Intel.
After following the breadcrumb trail and speaking with NVIDIA AIBs and OEM partners ("The ones that did speak to us have done so anonymously, in fear of losing their jobs, or having retribution placed upon them or their companies by NVIDIA," Bennett says), the picture is painted of an industry behemoth that aims to abuse its currently dominant market position. NVIDIA controls around 70% of the discrete GPU market share, and its industrious size is apparently being put to use to outmuscle its competitors' offerings by, essentially, putting partners between the proverbial rock and a hard place. According to Bennet, industry players unanimously brought about three consequences from Nvidia's GPP, saying that "They think that it has terms that are likely illegal; GPP is likely going to tremendously hurt consumers' choices; It will disrupt business with the companies that they are currently doing business with, namely AMD and Intel."
The crux of the issue seems to be in that NVIDIA, while publicly touting transparency, is hiding some not so transparent clauses from the public's view. Namely, the fact that in order to become a part of NVIDIA's GPP program, partners must have its "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce." Bennet says that he has read NVIDIA papers, and these very words, in internal documents meant for NVIDIA's partners only; however, none of these have been made available as of time of writing, though that may be an effort to protect sources.
But what does this "exclusivity" mean? That partners would have to forego products from other brands (case in point, AMD) in order to be granted the GeForce partner status. And what do companies who achieve GPP status receive? Well, enough that it would make competition from other NVIDIA AIBs that didn't make the partner program extremely difficult - if not unfeasible. This is because GPP-branded companies would receive perks such as: high-effort engineering engagements (likely, aids to custom designs); early tech engagement; launch partner status (as in, being able to sell GeForce-branded products at launch date); game bundling; sales rebate programs; social media and PR support; marketing reports; and the ultimate kicker, Marketing Development Funds (MDF). This last one may be known to our more attentive readers, as it was part of Intel's "Intel Inside" marketing program which spurred... a pretty incredible anti-trust movement against the company.
As a result of covering this story, HardOCP's Kyle Bennet says he expects the website to be shunned from now on when it comes to NVIDIA or NVIDIA partner graphics cards being offered for review purposes. Whether or not that will happen, I guess time will time; as time will tell whether or not there is indeed any sort of less... transparent plays taking place here.
Sources:
HardOCP, NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program
After following the breadcrumb trail and speaking with NVIDIA AIBs and OEM partners ("The ones that did speak to us have done so anonymously, in fear of losing their jobs, or having retribution placed upon them or their companies by NVIDIA," Bennett says), the picture is painted of an industry behemoth that aims to abuse its currently dominant market position. NVIDIA controls around 70% of the discrete GPU market share, and its industrious size is apparently being put to use to outmuscle its competitors' offerings by, essentially, putting partners between the proverbial rock and a hard place. According to Bennet, industry players unanimously brought about three consequences from Nvidia's GPP, saying that "They think that it has terms that are likely illegal; GPP is likely going to tremendously hurt consumers' choices; It will disrupt business with the companies that they are currently doing business with, namely AMD and Intel."
But what does this "exclusivity" mean? That partners would have to forego products from other brands (case in point, AMD) in order to be granted the GeForce partner status. And what do companies who achieve GPP status receive? Well, enough that it would make competition from other NVIDIA AIBs that didn't make the partner program extremely difficult - if not unfeasible. This is because GPP-branded companies would receive perks such as: high-effort engineering engagements (likely, aids to custom designs); early tech engagement; launch partner status (as in, being able to sell GeForce-branded products at launch date); game bundling; sales rebate programs; social media and PR support; marketing reports; and the ultimate kicker, Marketing Development Funds (MDF). This last one may be known to our more attentive readers, as it was part of Intel's "Intel Inside" marketing program which spurred... a pretty incredible anti-trust movement against the company.
As a result of covering this story, HardOCP's Kyle Bennet says he expects the website to be shunned from now on when it comes to NVIDIA or NVIDIA partner graphics cards being offered for review purposes. Whether or not that will happen, I guess time will time; as time will tell whether or not there is indeed any sort of less... transparent plays taking place here.
317 Comments on NVIDIA's New GPP Program Reportedly Engages in Monopolistic Practices
But it also explains to a degree AMD's big slant the last few generations towards a named platform ie from not really mentioning Architecture to noting polaris Big time to the next level of Vega being the card brand, clear evolution to adapt to just this.
@Prince Valiant Nvidia made nvlink as the safe gaurd against the threat of exactly that from intel, why do you supose intel consumer grade chips have so few pciex lanes natively, intel dont really want discrete Gpus ,thats not changed ,they want that revenue though some, no anyhow.
EVGA, PNY, Zotac have everything to gain since they are exclusive to Nvidia. They don't have to change anything to benefit from GPP.
The losers are the AIBs/OEMs that deal with both, ie Asus, MSI, Gigabyte. Even if they don't sing on to GPP and maintain their status quo they are relegated to a lower tier.
EVGA, PNY, Zotac would love to get more of Asus, MSI & Gigabyte sales.
So, up until now, the only downside of joining this program seems to be that you need to have a gaming line branded for Nvidia specifically. Kinda thin for four pages of comments/rage.
What really puzzles me is the lack of a motivation for GPP. I mean, ok, you get more support from Nvidia if you join. But if they really want to make their products look as good as possible, wht stops them from providing said support without GPP in place. Which, btw, they are doing right now. I cannot shake the feeling that there's more to this story, yet everybody seems content to scrape only the surface.
Gamers are victims and have a lack of choice anyway, Nvidia, AMD and their AIB partners are racking it in regardless.... no wonder Asrock want to join in, and it isn't for the benefit of gamers.
That could very well mean that the manufacturer doesn't have to have a gaming brand at all (can anyone say which is EVGA's gaming brand?). But if they do, they mustn't throw both Nvidia and AMD under the same brand. I'm not sure how dumb they think the average use must have gotten to need this kind of delineation, but that's what I understand from the little we have.
I'm kinda expecting an investigation for anti-competitive practices after this.
If Nividia (or any other partner surely), had PCB design interests, could a bespoke 'Gaming' card not be designed with a PCB that monitors power use? This would allow a dedicated, non-crunching/folding, non-mining design which looked for unusually high and constant power use. Such a design would throttle and ocasionally 'kill' the power through put after 'x' hours of constant high use. This would kill the demand for 24/7 mining rigs and make it perfectly usable for games which do not generally run for constant hours at full loads.
Now, you may bitch that would annoy people but how many games run for 4-6 hours at 90-100% load? But would such a design be appealing to a mining farm? Or is such engineering wizardry null and void?
You get two lines - Gaming power limited (cheaper) and Mining power unlimited (more expensive).
Just a tangent.
Only socialism behind the Iron Curtain adressed this from the root (i.e. the state took over the law, the courts and the economy). Trust me, that really, really hurt customer choice.
But really Nothing to see here, move along or move to AMD. They burnt a lot of loyal fans with 970's 3.5 GB of RAM and their response was that of a monopolistic company, so we already knew how they handle things. Let's not get started on Gimpworks made specifically to gain an leverage over their competition by using a developers platform.
Locked overclocking and the Ge"forced" experience is what you get.
I miss the GTX 580 days. Good times with competition and pricing was high but justifiable. ..... and there was NO MINING. Good times.
Partnerships like this have existed since forever, all we have right now is this one could be fishy and needs to be watched closely.
For all we know, this can be a marketing stunt from AMD: look, they're so scared of us, they're planning to break the law to keep us at bay. Obviously I'm making stuff up, but if I wanted to start a(nother) crapstorm, I could coroborate the above with the fact that it was AMD who tipped Kyle (interestingly enough manufaturers weren't as bothere by the GPP) and I could start a page conspiracy theorists will love.
So let's not do that here on TPU and try to concentrate on what we know, instead of what our gut or bias tells us.
If you bothered reading how the story developed no-one picked up their pitchforks or went on a crusade. It was shopped around of all things yet that didn't happen. On the contrary one person did his own investigation and then after talking to AIBs/OEMs did he feel their was something to it. Enough so he is willing to put his reputation on the line as well as his sites credibility with possible legal retribution. Others are reporting on him and his story.Remember the Time line. The Nvidia Blog for GPP didnt happen until after Kyles correspondence with Nvidia on the matter.For a transparent program which is to benefit us as gamers was in the shadows and who knows if Nvidia would ever say a word about it if it wasn't for the actions that took place.