Hi fellow THW citizens.
This is kind of like a personal rant on how the situation has been for the past one or two years. Before you fly personal insults on me, I'd like to introduce myself first. I've been a Tom's Hardware user for almost five years now, got some badges and had been quite active for a while. Now, even though not as active on the forums, I'm still coming here for reviews and those neat historical slideshows and well written guides. You can check my profile if you don't believe me, I hope I'm not going to damage my reputation just by posting a controllable rant.
It begins with this 290X review, 3 years ago. In my perspective, this is where I started think Tom's Hardware needs a new overhaul of the reviewing system (I did however found this as well somewhere in the GTX 680/7970 ages, but nevertheless nothing major). At that time, the 290X was obviously dominating and it was very easy to draw out the obvious conclusion. However, after this 780 Ti review, it was well noted that the 290X that was once known to be great, struggled against other Nvidia solutions that it once beat, because of "adjusted clocks using the reference cooler".
This made me chuckle a bit, because I know for a fact that it's going to make a lot of people confused, because you put all the focus into the reference version, while only mentioning a glimpse about AIB partner coolers, that're simply going to make a night and day difference. This, at that time, was I think extremely critical, as back then the market didn't know the options as well as it does nowadays.
Moving a generation further, we all saw this 980/970 review coming out, I then started to question your game choice, where you included 7 games and two of them, Assassin Creed and Watch Dogs, embarrassingly unoptimized. This means that from your only 7 games, only 5 are qualified enough to draw out a comprehensive conclusion, which I think isn't even enough to make a tight winner between the cards - let alone changing people's buying decision.
Things seemed to get worse when this 390X/380/370 review came out. You didn't even praise a single thing that is good about the cards! I know they're re-brands, I know that AMD hadn't been innovating that time, but hey, what about the key part of you guys reviewing? Where's the price to performance ratio there? Yet, it said
"AMD’s Radeon R7 370 is actually the most palatable of its three models, competing readily in the entry-level segment using acceptable efficiency, in spite of being three years old."
Which doesn't take a lot of thought process to conclude that there had been something wrong! Because the R9 390 and the R9 380 at a similar price point trounced the GTX 970 and the GTX 960 respectively!
Continuing to the R9 Fury X vs the GTX 980 Ti things might have improved, no broken games and everything was pretty much going very well. But still, seven games are still to little, and I had no idea why you guys removed the workstation/GPGPU benchmarks, but I wished these reviews continued with the addition of the number of games tested.
But it didn't happen.
This GTX 1060 review is where it all went downhill,
Broken games are back! (Project CARS, yay!)
BF4 (almost 3 years old!)
And what baffled me the most was:
"Averaging out the percentage differences between them, GeForce GTX 1060 is about 13.5% quicker at 1920x1080 across our suite. Its advantage slips to 12.5% at 2560x1440"
An average that included a 3 year old game and a super broken one, now that's what I call misinformation. And mind you that this is only 9 games, where are the other ones that at least isn't from yesteryear? There're thousands to choose for AAA games, why do you have to choose BF4 or Project CARS? I shook my head. Also, you must have been quite informed about future Low Level APIs, where are the games that has that? You used three out of nine, that only changed things a little, while the conclusion readers can take if there were more of them is much more significant than that?
And to sum that up, this is the one that made me face palm.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
In all, I'm not flaming Tom's Hardware, I'm not hating them, I'm not attacking them personally. But this is just how I see it. I know you guys have a huge audience, a huge reader base and a popular site overall. Just think about how the mistakes could change buying decisions of thousands! I know I've been keen to speak up about this, but I'd choose to say it at the right time, now. This is getting pretty intolerable that I've to speak up. I'll say sorry if I offended you in this essay, but please hear me and, feel free to disagree, in the correct way.
Thanks.
This is kind of like a personal rant on how the situation has been for the past one or two years. Before you fly personal insults on me, I'd like to introduce myself first. I've been a Tom's Hardware user for almost five years now, got some badges and had been quite active for a while. Now, even though not as active on the forums, I'm still coming here for reviews and those neat historical slideshows and well written guides. You can check my profile if you don't believe me, I hope I'm not going to damage my reputation just by posting a controllable rant.
It begins with this 290X review, 3 years ago. In my perspective, this is where I started think Tom's Hardware needs a new overhaul of the reviewing system (I did however found this as well somewhere in the GTX 680/7970 ages, but nevertheless nothing major). At that time, the 290X was obviously dominating and it was very easy to draw out the obvious conclusion. However, after this 780 Ti review, it was well noted that the 290X that was once known to be great, struggled against other Nvidia solutions that it once beat, because of "adjusted clocks using the reference cooler".
This made me chuckle a bit, because I know for a fact that it's going to make a lot of people confused, because you put all the focus into the reference version, while only mentioning a glimpse about AIB partner coolers, that're simply going to make a night and day difference. This, at that time, was I think extremely critical, as back then the market didn't know the options as well as it does nowadays.
Moving a generation further, we all saw this 980/970 review coming out, I then started to question your game choice, where you included 7 games and two of them, Assassin Creed and Watch Dogs, embarrassingly unoptimized. This means that from your only 7 games, only 5 are qualified enough to draw out a comprehensive conclusion, which I think isn't even enough to make a tight winner between the cards - let alone changing people's buying decision.
Things seemed to get worse when this 390X/380/370 review came out. You didn't even praise a single thing that is good about the cards! I know they're re-brands, I know that AMD hadn't been innovating that time, but hey, what about the key part of you guys reviewing? Where's the price to performance ratio there? Yet, it said
"AMD’s Radeon R7 370 is actually the most palatable of its three models, competing readily in the entry-level segment using acceptable efficiency, in spite of being three years old."
Which doesn't take a lot of thought process to conclude that there had been something wrong! Because the R9 390 and the R9 380 at a similar price point trounced the GTX 970 and the GTX 960 respectively!
Continuing to the R9 Fury X vs the GTX 980 Ti things might have improved, no broken games and everything was pretty much going very well. But still, seven games are still to little, and I had no idea why you guys removed the workstation/GPGPU benchmarks, but I wished these reviews continued with the addition of the number of games tested.
But it didn't happen.
This GTX 1060 review is where it all went downhill,
Broken games are back! (Project CARS, yay!)
BF4 (almost 3 years old!)
And what baffled me the most was:
"Averaging out the percentage differences between them, GeForce GTX 1060 is about 13.5% quicker at 1920x1080 across our suite. Its advantage slips to 12.5% at 2560x1440"
An average that included a 3 year old game and a super broken one, now that's what I call misinformation. And mind you that this is only 9 games, where are the other ones that at least isn't from yesteryear? There're thousands to choose for AAA games, why do you have to choose BF4 or Project CARS? I shook my head. Also, you must have been quite informed about future Low Level APIs, where are the games that has that? You used three out of nine, that only changed things a little, while the conclusion readers can take if there were more of them is much more significant than that?
And to sum that up, this is the one that made me face palm.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
In all, I'm not flaming Tom's Hardware, I'm not hating them, I'm not attacking them personally. But this is just how I see it. I know you guys have a huge audience, a huge reader base and a popular site overall. Just think about how the mistakes could change buying decisions of thousands! I know I've been keen to speak up about this, but I'd choose to say it at the right time, now. This is getting pretty intolerable that I've to speak up. I'll say sorry if I offended you in this essay, but please hear me and, feel free to disagree, in the correct way.
Thanks.