A new chapter in the eternal battle between Mr Red and Mr Green… SemiAccurate has posted an interesting article about the current hot story of ORIGIN PC. As you may know it, ORIGIN PC (by the way, one of the Battlebox partners), a gaming PC maker has decided to drop AMD Radeon cards in all new configurations. The reason comes from ORIGIN PC CEO and co-founder Kevin Wasielewski:
This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff. Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on NVIDIA GPUs,
According to SemiAccurate, NVIDIA would be behind the story. In short, AMD has fresh GPUs and powers two of the next three consoles while NVIDIA has no new product until next year (2014) to compete with the very upcoming Radeon R9 Series (and R7 too). So NVIDIA’s marketing team would have contacted some gaming PC makers with interesting offers in order to drop AMD’s GPUs:
Multiple sources all said the same thing, a certain Nvidia marketing person, they all called him Bryan for no particular reason, has been calling around to all the Tier 3++ gaming PC makers offering large dollops of funding to dump AMD GPUs or so the story goes. Multiple SemiAccurate sources say this number is in the six digit range, several gave exact figures but asked us not to publish them. This isn’t direct cash payments but more towards MDF funding, product discounts, and other quasi-legal kickbacks that are directly tied to and based on sales volume of AMD GPUs.
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…Why would Nvidia PR/Marketing stoop so low in such a transparent effort to besmirch the competition? Incompetence is only the root, desperation is the cause. The Battlebox mentioned above was meant as a counter to AMD’s Hawaii briefing last week and in few weeks Nvidia is flying the press to Canada to brief them on 4K video and drivers. Why are they doing this? Probably because AMD is about to launch the new R7/R9 cards in the same time frame and Nvidia has literally no answer until Q4/2014. Note that is not a typo, we did not mean Q4/2013, it is really over a year until they have a GK104 replacement.
More information here: How much did Nvidia pay Origin PC to drop AMD?
My experience with nvidia drivers and OpenCL is very bad. On all my customer, OpenCL use lot of CPU, no CPU used with AMD. And product lot of game crash and problem.
Interesting if true. SemiAccurate, as the name implies, used to put focus more on early scoops and rumours, less on verifiable sources (haven’t checked the site in a while, maybe they got better), though this has in the past allowed them to be first on some stories. They likewise had a “slight” ATI bias, so this story kind of fits with that profile. I might be proven wrong, but always take their stories with a bit more than a just pinch of salt.
JHH is in big trouble according to latest rumours the nVidia board forced him to backpaddle on this whole fiasco
@DrBalthar: o rly? What’s next? Nvidia paid to get into Steam Machines? Valve wouldn’t take shitty APUs for free.
@AMDisMAD
First off nobody cares about Steam Machines as it already has EPIC FAILURE written all over it.
Second apparently there will be AMD Steam machines as well
Third maybe? Do I care? No!
Steam machines are to connect to the TV are they not?