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Nvidia retreats from PR disaster

by on14 December 2020


Decides that reviewer is allowed to write reviews after all

GPU maker named after a Roman vengence demon,  Nvidia made a hamfisted attempt to bully a reviewer into writing what it wanted last week by threatening to stop providing him with GeForce Founders Edition review units.

Steven Walton runs the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (and is also an editor/reviewer at TechSpot) and Nvidia was upset that his reviews and recommendations have continued to focus singularly on rasterisation performance, and discounts “other technologies we offer gamers.”

Nvidia said that it was clear from Walton’s “community commentary” that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do."

Nvidia said that review products would instead be allocated to other media outlets "that recognise the changing landscape of gaming and the features that are important to gamers and anyone buying a GPU today, be it for gaming, content creation, or studio and stream."

However less than 48 hours later, Walton received the good news. Nvidia apologized and walked everything back."

Rather than Walton not being in touch with the tech community, it turned out that they largely rallied behind him.

TechSpot ranted: In today's dynamic graphics hardware space, with 350W flagships, hardware ray tracing, and exotic cooling solutions, there's a wide range of data points Hardware Unboxed looks at. But at the end of the day, there's only one real question every GPU buyer wants to know: how well do games run on a particular piece of hardware? Considering that 99 per cent percent of Steam games feature raster-only rendering pipelines, rasterization performance was, is, and will be, a key point that Steve considers in GPU reviews.”

Last modified on 14 December 2020
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