Nvidia Ends Notorious GeForce Partner Program
Nvidia put a fork in its now infamous GeForce Partner Program, citing recent negative commentary as the primary reason for the abrupt cancellation.
The statement is the company’s first official response to the alleged foul play that was first brought to light back in March, with several outlets reporting that the program puts an unfair burden on its partners to align their gaming brands exclusively with Nvidia.
Several AIB partners rebranded many of their AMD-based graphics cards a short time later, with Gigabyte dropping its Aorus moniker from its RX580 Gaming Box and Asus renaming its entire AMD GPU lineup. AMD made a direct response to the surging reports of the implications, giving more credibility to the claim that the GPP could be having an effect on how vendors brand their respective gaming products.
Nvidia claimed in its blog that it’s shutting down the GPP because it would prefer to cancel the program “rather than battling misinformation.” The company further dismissed the allegations of wrongdoing by claiming that the program was quite transparent, and that no bad blood existed between Nvidia and its AIB partners:
With GPP, we asked our partners to brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear. The choice of GPU greatly defines a gaming platform. So, the GPU brand should be clearly transparent – no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon.Most partners agreed. They own their brands and GPP didn’t change that. They decide how they want to convey their product promise to gamers. Still, today we are pulling the plug on GPP to avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we’re doing to bring amazing advances to PC gaming.
Although the cancellation of the Nvidia GPP may give those who already believe that the Green Team is pure evil all the confirmation they need that the program was indeed toxic, the surge of negative press coverage over the ambiguity of the published guidelines could just be enough of a headache for Nvidia to throw in the towel, and one could hardly blame them.
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Derek Forrest was a contributing freelance writer for Tom's Hardware. He covered hardware news and reviews, focusing on gaming desktops and laptops.
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dextermat Good riddance! Saddly they will come back with some other garbage thanks to marketing cancer! Big almost monopoly business price gouging program MUST stop!Reply -
shrapnel_indie What wasn't clear???Reply
ROG GTX-1080Ti
ROG RX-580
It's clear enough to me.... oh wait... they must have though, we the customer couldn't tell an AMD GPU model from theirs... -
redgarl AMD was in the procedure to sue them, as simple as that. This banana peel is going to be there for a long time.Reply
I have a 1080 TI an I had a 1080 FTW. If I can avoid them in the future, I will, just by principle. I might need a mid range GPU next year, guess what... it will not be green. -
Xenocrates Well, the difference between a ROG GTX-580 and a ROG Rx-580 is a lot less clear. Not to mention that you have things like the Zotac ZT-P10710G-10P, or other cases of the alphabet soup of model numbers, as well as things like Windforce OC 8G (Note that that Gigabyte card doesn't have much in the way of clarification as to which chipset it's using, until you get to disecting the model number Gigabyte GV-N1080WF3OC-8GD)Reply
Now, I think GPP was a grab at established brands with goodwill. But if Nvidia demanded clearer names, like requiring that the marketing names and/or cooler shrouds be clearly delineated (for example, having the Nvidia logo/name on the shrouds of their cards, and adding Geforce to all the marketing names), without grabbing the brands exclusively, I could get behind that. What is important is that from what I heard, they weren't refusing to do business with anyone who didn't join GPP, but were merely moving them down in the stack, relatively speaking. I'm also not sure if it demanded their only gaming branded stuff be Nvidia (Really wrong), their current flagship gaming brand be Nvidia only (Still wrong), or that Nvidia have a exclusive gaming brand, new or existing at the partners discretion (slightly wrong, mostly neutral). -
dudmont First thing you do when you're in a hole? Stop digging!Reply
This whole GPP was a joke to start with. When life gets me down in 5 years time, I'll just have to remember the GPP and I'll end up with aching sides from laughing so hard..... -
barryv88 All they basically said was "Sorry, we only want to bring you fantastically awesome products" with a million smiley faces attached.Reply
They didn't admit to anything. Because they know they've been caught. But its their smug arrogant response that will have me avoid them for a rather long time to come. Remember when Linus Torvalds threw them a middle finger? Well, here's mine to you Nvidia! -
Giroro "no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon."Reply
Comments like that are the reason people hate Nvidia. Well that mixed with the fact their adaptive sync technology doesn't actually work with anybody's monitors, and at this point Gysync monitors are nearly impossible to find (and absurdly overpriced, and don't work with freesync).
Look, if this program -wasn't- toxic, then why did all the board partners have to waste money launching new brands for AMD? Why didn't any of the companies make Nvidia-exclusive branding instead? -
Xenocrates Reply
Because Nvidia has historically had the lions share of the GPU market?20941681 said:Look, if this program -wasn't- toxic, then why did all the board partners have to waste money launching new brands for AMD? Why didn't any of the companies make Nvidia-exclusive branding instead?
That is the only reason, other than it being a hard requirement of the program. Either way, Nvidia was abusing it's market position, even if the program only meant that you got priority, or binned chips. With both, it was threatening the viability of higher end brands in a major way to not join. -
Durwesh Naeem I am soo confused.... does this mean geforce experience software will come to an endReply