Nvidia’s GeForce Partner Program (GPP) has been a matter of concern among PC gamers ever since HardOCP’s Kyle Bennett highlighted the program’s anti-competitive nature which is expected to have an impact on consumer choice. Bennett’s report alleged that the program demanded GPU manufacturers and OEMs to align their gaming sub-brands exclusively with Nvidia, dropping AMD products in the process.
While Nvidia denies these allegations, a number of threads on Reddit highlight that OEMs like Gigabyte and MSI have already signed up for the program and have subsequently dropped their gaming branding from AMD products. For example, Gigabyte recently launched a new gaming graphics enclosure powered by an AMD Radeon RX 580 and unlike previous enclosures from the company, which carry Gigabyte’s AORUS branding, the AMD enclosure has a generic Gigabyte sticker.
When Gigabyte was approached for a statement regarding the same, the company said that the external graphics enclosure isn’t for gamers, despite the fact that the company branded it as a “Gaming Box”. The product page on Gigabyte’s official website also states “Turn Your Ultrabook to Gaming Platform” and “Upgrade the Game Experience”, in contrast with the company’s statement. It’s worth noting that Gigabyte isn’t the only brand that has dropped all gaming branding from AMD products; MSI has also removed all of its AMD GPUs from their ‘MSI Gaming’ brand.
When we approached AMD regarding the matter, the company issued a statement to Beebom saying:
“We are aware of a new Nvidia partner program for PC and add-in board partners that we believe could limit consumer access to competitive graphics technologies. While we are not commenting on any of the specifics that have not been disclosed publicly by Nvidia at this time, we believe consumers should ask for full transparency around the program.”
Now, consumers have finally come to terms with the consequences and have called for a boycott of all Nvidia GPP Partners. The “Official Boycott of NVIDIA GPP Partners” thread on Reddit states
The thread has received over 1,600 upvotes as of writing and a number of users have expressed their concern regarding Nvidia’s GPP in the comments. However, a few users have also pointed out that instead of boycotting GPP partners, consumers should boycott Nvidia, as the partners “are being strongarmed into these contracts.” A comment on the thread elaborates that the partners don’t have any choice other than joining GPP, because if they don’t they risk falling behind other OEMs that join the program.
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join this to stop NVIDIA’s monopoly:
reddit.com/r/HP
wake up call: dear developers please stop using vendor specific APIs
Dear developers and scientists, Please stop using vendor specific APIs like CUDA. Do you really like to live in a world ruled by just one company. The one company who dictates you what hardware you have to buy and when you will receive an upgrade for it? A world without any competition. NVIDIA is heading towards a monopoly in the GPU market and it will not be good for any of us.
I know it is the main stream API for GPU programing but you are helping a monopoly. I understand the alternatives (OpenCl, OpenGL compute shaders and later Vulkan …) are not as good, but we have to pay the price.
If you are using any library, SDK, package or software which includes CUDA code, I encourage you to switch to OpenCL alternatives. And if you are developing in CUDA please switch to OpenCL, before it is too late.
This isn’t the first time nVidia is being an bumhole either. Anyone remember the time when AMD started that thing which was similar to hairworks? It was open source and nVidia took it, and created hairworks. Yes, AMD kinda screwed themselves over by making it completely open source, or whatever, but nVidia also did something bi**hy. Idk what else nVidia might do to f over AMD. I don’t want competition from AMD to die off, or else, we may have to deal with all nVidia GPUs becoming 100$ more expensive, just because nVidia wants to make it that way. Only going to buy AMD graphics cards now. I don’t want to be screwed over by nVidia even more.
This is gonna hurt a lot to consumers and OEMs and will only benefit to NVIDIA. Even I am gonna affected by this as I am going to buy a new GPU either from AMD or NVIDIA but now I will buy GPU from AMD as they give much features than NVIDIA and also they have AMD FreeSync which is quite awesome!
I hope cryptocurrencies will crash and GPUs will get much affordable and also there will not be any wastage of electricity! ????