You know, after Valantar devolved into personal attacks with his nonsense post, where he also revealed his role as a "media analyst" aka social media monitor / propaganda artist / marketing lacky / messaging control, I was just not going to respond.
But now here you are, playing your childish game. You guys are the forum thugs here, every forum has them. He called Nvidia the media mob, what a hypocrite.
These are corporations and they don't play by your make believe double standards, they never have and they never will.
Nvidia's only mistake here was sending an email - they should have just kept their mouths shut - Like AMD
mostly did.
Oh, didn't think about that?
AMD withheld the R9 Nano from Techreport and KitGuru. Quite likely others. This is a few magnitudes of order bigger media outlet than that pea shooter two guys in a back bedroom with a camcorder HW unboxed channel.
Doesn't fit with your media control narrative? So sad..
2015 AMD witholds samples from KitGuru :
AMD's upcoming Fury release next week has been much anticipated - the incredible level of global cov
www.kitguru.net
And did the same thing to TechReport :
Although we've covered the Fiji GPU and the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card closely since it was first announced, I've just been informed that AMD has chosen not to provide...
techreport.com
Oh heck lets just tear them up. AMD bribed people to crash an Nvidia event. They still have these groups in operation. Team Red is a real thing. It is basically a propaganda / disinformation campaign, part of their marketing department. Email pic and article from Forbes below.
Now, this I would say, is playing dirty. Really unethical.
Are you dumb enough to think they have changed? Just a question.
Who is it Valantar works for now?
View attachment 179721
At some point today, a fascinating email will be dispatched from AMD to roughly 15,000 of their most hardcore evangelists around the world known as the 'Red Team.' Its contents? An invitation to happily crash Nvidia's Game24 party in the name of PC gaming.
www.forbes.com
Wait, personal attacks? Where? How? I'd love for you to give some examples. I have criticized and argued against your reasoning, arguments and way of presenting them. I haven't said a word about you as a person, your motivations or your character.
Also, please work on your reading comprehension. I didn't say "media analyst" (and I wholeheartedly agree that that, as well as most titles involving the word "analyst", has a significant degree of BS baked in), I said "media researcher", as in a researcher working within media studies at a university level. (And no, I'm not trying to brag or assert some sort of authority through saying this, I'm bringing it up
purely because you claimed that I didn't understand how media biases are formed, which warranted a response.) Taking a bit of care when reading the posts of the people you're debating would be helpful, I think, as well as what I said before:
Please check your condescending BS at the door.
As for that AMD marketing stuff:
- The R9 Nano debacle was widely discussed around the internet. While AMD was indeed pretty shitty in not seeding it widely for review, it's
a little understandable seeing how that GPU was never a mainstream product in the first place, but one of the few premium niche GPUs ever released. The same can't be said for the RTX 3060 Ti, after all. Does that mean that AMD's behaviour in that situation was acceptable? Of course not.
- That T-shirt stunt, whether true or not, seems emblematic of the extremely childish PR AMD RTG has been known for over the past 5 or so years, which thankfully seems to be changing. GN has done a couple of excellent videos on this, and it's not exactly a secret. I've never said that I don't find AMD's marketing tactics problematic either, just that what Nvidia is doing here is far more ethically problematic. Why? Because Nvidia is explicitly telling HWUB that "unless you review our products the way we want you to, you won't be getting any more review samples." That additional nuance - even compared to the AMD example with KitGuru - makes a significant difference, precisely because of the specificity of their demands. The AMD-Kitguru example was broad enough that it might encompass editorial content, commentary, industry analysis, or a ton of other stuff that a tech site might cover. Nvidia explicitly and specifically said that
review content needed to conform to their wishes. Of course consciously biased editorial content or industry analysis is also BS that any media outlet with an ounce of self respect would balk at, but explicitly influencing review content is worse due to its direct link to readers' purchase decisions.
There's also an argument to be made regarding the relative clout of the companies in question - Nvidia has a clearly dominant market position, meaning they have more power to abuse, and as such abuses of power from them are fundamentally more problematic. That doesn't mean that abuses of power from weaker players are unproblematic by any means, but having less power to abuse, they also have less opportunity to actually exert undue influence.
The point is very simple but apparently beyond your cognitive ability.
Anyone who believes that big companies don't exert influence over first take reviewers is a fool, that would be you as you've demonstrated.
Nvidia's mistake was sending an email. They should have simply blacklisted them. If you think that doesn't happen all the time, like I said, you'd be a fool.
And no you can't read reviewer's minds. You don't know what happens behind the scenes. Your assumptions aren't truth. You're not that smart.
Now who is resorting to personal attacks? Please chill out man. We were having an on-topic debate here.
Nobody here has said that reviewers are fundamentally unbiased, or that companies don't influence them. We've just argued that this bias is both visible enough and accounted for to a sufficient degree to not be a problem in many cases (while also acknowledging that there are some very obviously biased people creating tech content out there, though few I would call journalists or reviewers). That obviously doesn't mean it's not worth discussing - quite the opposite! - but this is what I meant by
bombastic and all-encompassing black-and-white conclusions.
Nobody here has said that blacklisting doesn't happen, nor that it's okay when it happens behind the scenes (which you are more than implying). Also, Nvidia
didn't send an email - they responded after HWUB contacted them four or five times asking what had happened. At that point a non-response would have been rather obvious too.
As for reading reviewers' minds: that's not necessary. Most professional reviewers' reasoning is directly accounted for when discussing their review methodologies, and while there is of course the possibility of hidden biases not included in this, that's where one can apply their own judgement as to whether the priorities and choices made by reviewers seem to make sense. You're significantly underestimating the ability of even a casual reader to identify biases in what they are reading. Hiding your biases well is
extremely difficult, which is why most propaganda is woefully transparent, so you're also overestimating the proficiency of tech reviewers in being duplicitous. As I said, they're mostly quite ordinary people, and most ordinary people are not very good liars. Being a tech journalist or youtuber isn't likely to significantly increase how good you are at lying or hiding your biases.
Ray tracing is the next evolution of video game graphics.
Look how awesome Cyberpunk 2077 looks with it:
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best open-world RPGs ever. In our performance article, we're taking a closer look at the hardware requirements, using 22 modern graphics cards. We also have tons of screenshots and a side-by-side image comparison for raytracing and DLSS quality.
www.techpowerup.com
It makes more visual impact than 2K or 4K.
Now, the problem with this thread is the following quote by Hardware Unboxed:
"Their reasoning is that we are focusing on rasterization instead of ray tracing."
If it's not true, different wording should been used to indicate Nvidia's reasoning isn't true to begin with… such as: claim, accuse, falsely, etc.
No, it is not obvious. That quote means Nvidia's reasoning is in fact true and Hardware Unboxed deserves this:
A single word in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.
Sorry, but no. An accusation does not automatically become true unless explicitly challenged. You are not assumed guilty until proven otherwise. Also, in my opinion you're reading this wrong: "their reasoning is" says nothing more than "they think we...". It says nothing about the truth or falsehood of the claim, it only comments on their reasoning alone. They
could have chosen to word this in a way like you suggest, but not doing so isn't the tacit agreement with Nvidia's reasoning that you are claiming it to be. That sentence in no way agrees with Nvidia's reasoning or accept the premises presented. For it to be that, they would have needed to say something like "Nvidia disagrees with our choice to focus on rasterization instead of ray tracing".
Which, just because it bears repeating, isn't something HWUB has done - quite the opposite!
And again, regardless of that, Nvidia has no business policing the editorial policies of reviewers. That clearly doesn't stop them trying both explicitly like this or implicitly like a ton of other examples. Nor does it stop everyone else in the industry from doing so - that's a large part of the job of a PR department after all, to make their company look as good as possible in whatever ways possible. That still doesn't mean that shit like this is even remotely acceptable.
Whether or not RT is the future of game graphics is entirely irrelevant to this debate. I think it has a lot of merit, and that Nvidia deserves a lot of praise for bringing it to the market (though
how they did this is worthy of some criticism), but ... so what? How is that relevant here?
