NVIDIA's New GPP Program Reportedly Engages in Monopolistic Practices

[sith'ari]

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Think about this: if you were Nvidia and investing money in promoting brands, would you pay to promote ROG if ROG was made up of both Nvidia and AMD products? I'm sure Nvidia didn't come up with GPP out of goodness of their hearts, but at the same time I realize there can be legit reasoning behind those clauses.

Exactly that!!
I also asked the same question at [H]'s forum, but noone gave me a logical answer!!

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3) Doesn't a company -(NVidia in this case)- has the right, to use any legal means in order for her products to be distinguished compared to the competition?
Why both GPUs, GeForce & Radeon must have the exact same brand-name, whether this brand is called ROG or Aorus, or whatever ? !! Is this a free market or not? Why must NVidia has to tolerate their products to be sold under the same brand-name as their rivals ?
NVidia can also complain that this kind of current policy is damaging their own interests and advertisement, just like AMD complains for the opposite !!
( https://hardforum.com/threads/geforce-partner-program-impacts-consumer-choice.1955963/page-15 )

 

[INSTG8R]

PCPartner - Zotac, Manli, Inno3D

Yeah I checked that too but....

 

[jabbadap]

Afaik, pcpartner and sapphire have common past, but they are now complete different entities. That subvendor hexa code 174B goes back to early 2000, on the other hand one of the pcpartners brand Zotac has subvendor code of 19DA.

 

[HTC]

Assuming this whole thing turns out to be true and in order for a company to adhere to the program, it has to "turn away" the other manufacturers from the brand that will gain the exclusivity for the GPP.

Imagine ASUS ROG has said yes to GPP: does that mean motherboards also have to leave the ROG brand?

Just wondering ...

 

[bug]

Assuming this whole thing turns out to be true and in order for a company to adhere to the program, it has to "turn away" the other manufacturers from the brand that will gain the exclusivity for the GPP.

Imagine ASUS ROG has said yes to GPP: does that mean Intel motherboards also have to leave the ROG brand?

Just wondering ...

Even if this happens, I expect everything to stay under their current brands while Nvidia products move under the new brand. At least that's what makes sense to me.

 

[HTC]

Even if this happens, I expect everything to stay under their current brands while Nvidia products move under the new brand. At least that's what makes sense to me.

It would be hilarious if, under this scenario with ASUS, they came up with a brand just for nVidia, thus making nVidia's whole "let's make their most successful brand only sell our products" fail spectacularly ...

 

[mouacyk]

What makes the most sense to me is every partner just leave the pristine product in a plain box with a proper label and charge me 30% less.

Or, they all scrap the problematic shared branding of yesteryear, and start all new distinguished branding with branding-aligned funding.

 

[bug]

It would be hilarious if, under this scenario with ASUS, they came up with a brand just for nVidia, thus making nVidia's whole "let's make their most successful brand only sell our products" fail spectacularly ...

You're just making up stuff. Nowhere is it specified that manufacturers are expected to surrender their most successful brand to Nvidia. It just says that, because Nvidia will be involved in the promotion of a brand, they need a brand that doesn't carry products from their competition. I really don't understand why people insist of reading this any other way.

 

[HTC]

You're just making up stuff. Nowhere is it specified that manufacturers are expected to surrender their most successful brand to Nvidia. It just says that, because Nvidia will be involved in the promotion of a brand, they need a brand that doesn't carry products from their competition. I really don't understand why people insist of reading this any other way.

According to Kyle from HardOCP, nVidia seeks exclusivity and that means no other manufactures are to be used under the GPP program. Should that not include motherboards as well, for example?

 

[bug]

According to Kyle from HardOCP, nVidia seeks exclusivity and that means no other manufactures are to be used under the GPP program. Should that not include Intel motherboards as well, for example?

Nope. They seek brand exclusivity. That's all.

 

[HTC]

Nope. They seek brand exclusivity. That's all.

It appears we are interpreting the same thing differently.

I did make a mistake in my previous replies: i said "Intel motherboards" when i should have said "motherboards". I'll edit the replies accordingly.

In the case of ASUS, they'd want the ROG brand to sell nVidia products only because, in this case, that's what exclusivity means. Since ASUS ROG also sells motherboards, this means that they would have to stop doing that under the ROG brand.

 

[mouacyk]

Nope. They seek brand exclusivity. That's all.

That is not all. Kyle, AIB/OEMs, and AMD are saying NVidia is pushing AMD out of the established and successful gaming brands, that every gamer knows, blindly relies on, and looks forward to building with. And, no one is being compensated for the loss.

 

[Xzibit]

Afaik, pcpartner and sapphire have common past, but they are now complete different entities. That subvendor hexa code 174B goes back to early 2000, on the other hand one of the pcpartners brand Zotac has subvendor code of 19DA.

From my understanding. PCPartner invested in Sapphire Tech in its early stages and as years passed they rolled back to focus more on Zotac mainly Nvidia from what i gather. PCPartner never had control of Sapphire Tech.

 

[jabbadap]

From my understanding. PCPartner invested in Sapphire Tech in its early stages and as years passed they rolled back to focus more on Zotac mainly Nvidia from what i gather. PCPartner never had control of Sapphire Tech.

Yeah they owned 40% of Sapphire in 2001, might still own that 4.95% which was the case in 2011(if I read this correctly). So all in all PC Partner is still OEM/ODM manufacturer for i.e. AMD and Sapphire, but it have it's own brands too, all nvidia.

 

[Xzibit]

Linus talks about it.

Skip ahead to 13:00

Not much new on it but he provides insight on his dealings & perception with Nvidia behind the scenes

 

[evernessince]

Looks like AIBs have already started stripping AMD cards of their branding...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/85n378

 

[sith'ari]

"The Good Old Gamer" has changed his opinion over GPP (*his 1st video about GPP was very harsh towards NVidia) after the release of NV's Ray-tracing RTX technology.
After the RTX-tech, justifiable reasons have applied for NVidia in order for them to want to push forward the GPProgram . So he has reconsidered his perspective about GPP.

 

[Xzibit]

Forbes - New Clues Suggest MSI And Gigabyte Are Aligned With GeForce Partner Program

My own follow-up to his investigation is stalled. I'd secured a commitment from a few companies to speak off the record, but they have also gone dark. Prior to that happening I had two brief conversations that made it obvious the program was troublesome, to put it mildly.

Article goes on to point to potential effects of GPP

Update:

Gigabyte tells ComputerBase.de that this product does not have AUROS branding because it is "not gamer focused." Perhaps that's marketing speak for "it can't be gamer focused anymore..."

ComputerBase has inquired at Gigabyte why the model with Radeon RX 580 is the only one of the series not running under Gigabyte's brand for player "Aorus". The manufacturer explains that the focus in this case is not on players. However , this can not be reconciled with the product page, whose first headlines are " Turn Your Ultrabook to Gaming Platform " and " Upgrade the Game Experience ".

Now thats funny

 

[bug]

Forbes - New Clues Suggest MSI And Gigabyte Are Aligned With GeForce Partner Program



Article goes on to point to potential effects of GPP

"Potential" we've been discussing for two weeks now. It's the "actual" I'm interested in. But I'm going to read that regardless.

 

[kruk]

"Potential" we've been discussing for two weeks now. It's the "actual" I'm interested in. But I'm going to read that regardless.

 

[bug]

Oh, the nvidia kill puppies argument. How could I forget about that?

Edit: Just for clarity, I've never said GPP was all peachy. It's just that I read it (admittedly in ahurry) and didn't find anything alarming. But since I don't speak legaleze, I'm waiting for other parties to point out the nefarious sections.

 

[Valantar]

No, of course I don't want to get into details, because details is what we don't have. You seem to think there can be only one, I don't. Can we just leave it at that?

The issue with "we don't have the details, so we shouldn't discuss this" is that you are clearly taking a stand as to what constitutes a brand (in this regard) in the suggestions in your posts, but refusing to discuss the foundation of this stance nor what this stance entails, not to mention the likelihood of your assumption being accurate with regard to the information we currently have. I'm completely open that I'm taking a pessimistic stance here, and that I might very well be wrong. I've also made clear the reasoning behind this stance. You refuse to do anything of the kind, instead arguing that your stance is instead some kind of non-stance or default, which is absurd on its face - shown by your own arguments. If you truly believed that there was too little information to discuss this, you wouldn't be promoting your own suggestions, as this would be logically impossible.

As for the seeming signs of AMD products dwindling from high-end gaming lines, I'll hold off speculating too much on what that entails for now. While it definitely looks worrying, there are some clear reasons (such as Nvidia's clear GPU performance advantage) that could be the reason for things such as the RX 580 Gaming Box being labelled Gigabyte rather than Aorus (there's no equivalent performance Nvidia box (GTX 1060), regardless of branding). The relative lack of gaming-branded Vega cards was - and still is, really - explained by chip shortages and other issues (mining, mainly). Still, Asus lists both the Vega 64 and 56 on its global ROG product listing. Asus also has the recently launched Ryzen + RX 580 GL702 laptop. Then again, development cycles for PCs and components are 2+ years at best, and re-branding isn't a trivial matter. I suppose we'll see how this pans out in a while.

 

[bug]

The issue with "we don't have the details, so we shouldn't discuss this" ...

My issue is I don't have a lot of time. If I don't have details, than I'm only discussing opinions. Which is less than useless imho. What you should do, however, is not my problem. Just don't push your discussion based on opinions as fact, truth or something else that it isn't.
The rest of your wall of text, I'm not going to read.

 

[Valantar]

My issue is I don't have a lot of time. If I don't have details, than I'm only discussing opinions. Which is less than useless imho. What you should do, however, is not my problem. Just don't push your discussion based on opinions as fact, truth or something else that it isn't.
The rest of your wall of text, I'm not going to read.

That, my friend, is your right, as it is mine to point out the logical inconsistencies in your arguments. I suppose we should leave it at that.

 

[Super XP]

This GPP stands for the following based on my research:
- Pro Monopoly
- Anti Gaming
- Anti Consumerism
- Anti Competition

Here's Nvidia's domain about GPP which is a blatant lie.
Here's the Statement """GeForce Partner Program Helps Gamers Know What They're Buying"

Nvidia claims the program isn’t exclusive, yet the agreement asks for exclusivity with a partner’s main gaming brand. Nvidia claims partners can stop participating at any time, but in reality if they do, they will put themselves in a disadvantageous position. Nvidia claims the program is about transparency, but no one is saying which companies are part of the GPP.