Nvidia has blacklisted the Hardware Unboxed technochannel for ignoring the advantages of retracing
Nvidia provoked a scandal. She refused to provide video cards for review to the popular Hardware Unboxed channel due to the fact that its authors allegedly pay insufficient attention to the advantages of retracing. The company tried to apologize, but many reviewers found such a precedent outrageous.
The problem was reported by the authors of the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel on Friday. “Their argument is that we pay attention to rasterization instead of ray tracing,” the tech bloggers said.
Thus, the company decided that Hardware Unboxed will no longer receive samples of GeForce Founders Edition video cards for review. Nvidia was ready to reverse its decision only if the authors change their editorial policy.
Later, Hardware Unboxed published a letter sent by a company representative to their author Steve Walton.
“Despite all the progress, your reviews and recommendations for choosing GPUs still focus solely on rasterization performance. You almost completely ignore all the other technologies that we offer to gamers,” wrote Bryan Del Rizzo, the company’s senior PR manager.
Hardware Unboxed stated that rasterization will remain a priority in their reviews, since rateracing is still not fully supported by many games. At the same time, the authors clarified that getting blacklisted by Nvidia will not affect their opinion about the company’s products in any way.
To be clear, this really won’t impact our reviews and opinions in any way. We won’t start hating Nvidia, this isn’t the first time companies have cut us off, and it hasn’t affected our thoughts on products previously https://t.co/CeDDO2HX4U
— Hardware Unboxed (@HardwareUnboxed) December 11, 2020
На сторону Hardware Unboxed встали другие западные техноблогеры и обзорщики. Среди них — JayZTwoCents and Linus from the Linus Tech Tips channel. They found Nvidia’s behavior outrageous and harmful to the entire industry. The authors also stated that the company simply broke away from reality.
Two days later, Nvidia apologized to Hardware Unboxed and Steve personally, reversing its decision and taking back its words. However, everyone agrees that this happened only thanks to the publicity and support from colleagues and the community.
