Stefan Mileschin

Geforce Partner Program RIP

Geforce Partner Program is officially terminated, as of last Friday, and it makes Nvidia look guilty as hell. Nvidia - a massively dominating player - has close to 75 percent of discrete market share, but this varies up and down from quarter to quarter. Some report that regulators got involved and started looking at GPP. Once you have 75 percent plus market share in anything, you don't want regulators to knock on your doors.

Nvidia was always famous for its aggressive marketing and its aggressive sales tactics. AMD only grew in market share because of the GPU mining craze as Nvidia has dominated the market for the last few years now.

The Register links this sudden death decision with the fact that anti-competitive regulatory started looking at Nvidia. As soon as this happened, Nvidia canceled the controversial GPP. There was a claim that key regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and European Commission started looking into the anti-competitive nature of the program.

Nvidia basically said to its partners, including Asus, that for example Republic of Gaming cannot carry AMD branded cards as Nvidia is paying a lot into the ROG program. This didn’t look fair, but many things in life are not fair.

We were asked for our opinion about the Geforce Partner Program and the unfairness of the whole thing, but this didn’t look like something out of the ordinary. Nvidia has been known to bully its partners internally, have favorite partner(s) who tend to get more than the others, at least this has been the accusation since the beginning of time.

The more you sell, the more love you get from CEO Jen Hsun Huang, of the Nvidia kingdom, but this is not something out of ordinary in the general PC sales strategy.

Someone at Nvidia must have realized that preventing AMD to get some of the free rides of Nvidia marketing bucks was pointless. Nvidia will be good even without this pressure on its partners. Instead of focusing on controversial marketing blockades, Nvidia should look forward to the soon-to-be-launch Turing GPU that will slaughter anything that AMD has in the pipeline.

https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/4...it-look-guilty