Nvidia’s F2P in-game cash bundle

[spoffle]

There's good and bad here, if we look beyond the fanboyism:

Are NVIDIA greedy? Silly them for wanting to make money...they are a business. They have invested heavily in a ground up build with Kepler, Cloud, GeForce Experience and Sheild. NOT FORGETTING the EPIC tier one titles over the last 12 months: Assassin's Creed 3, Batman Arkham City, BF3. HARDLY indicitative of a company too tight to spend money. AMD still have the same tech they had 2 years ago with a few speed bumps.

Every business is there to make money, and no one should begrudge a business for trying to do so, however businesses have to strike a balance on what they're offering for a certain amount of money.

R&D costs aren't something to factor in, and it's not something that they should rely on their customers to reimburse them for, AMD also had R&D costs and claim that their chips were new built from the ground up.

Realistically, each generation of chip from AMD and nVidia are very similar, even if both sides claim it's completely new from the ground up technology. It'll still be heavily borrowing from the previous generation.

I think you're making a few uninformed assumptions on what sort of R&D nVidia and AMD have been doing to develop their latest cards, and the AMD chips have probably changed more so than the nVidia ones anyway.

Kepler is very similar to Fermi, and the games orientated GPUs have been cut down for games only, that's really the biggest difference. I think people's perception of nVidia being greedy is that this is the first time in quite some time, that nVidia have had a smaller GPU than AMD instead of being significantly bigger (Fermi was what, nearly 90% bigger than AMD's chips at the time?) and yet they are still charging significantly more, for less performance and an awful game bundle.

I do believe nVidia are tight, but not in the way others are suggestion, and I think their involvement in games is to the detriment of everyone else, because most of the time when they have some sort of hands on influence with a developer, some drama comes of it.

It kinda hit the mainstream when Batman Arkham Asylum came out and they had a few dodgy things going on there, one was the PhysX use, and the second was the anti-aliasing, where rocksteady/eidos and nVidia couldn't blame the other quick enough, which always shows dodgy dealings have gone on.

The reason I think nVidia are tight is that they seem much more interested in paying developers for advertising and to add dodgy features to games (at the detriment of everyone as above) to make people think their products are better, instead of just putting their money in to their products.

On AMD's side, Their bundle is, in my opinion, FAR stronger in this case for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread.
They are cheaper because they are dropping prices on old tech to claw back market share (NVIDIA at approx 70%) and they are buying share with bundles like this. This is costing them money:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/01/23/amd-losses/1

Historically, AMD have always been cheaper than nVidia for the same or even more performance.

Their 79XX release prices were bad, but generally they have been the better priced.

AMD are clearly making a bigger effort to be part of the games development industry, whilst not trying to screw over end users, as well as interfacing with the public about software issues and so on.

On the flip side for AMD, they have a GPU in the original Wii, a GPU in the Wii U and its reported that the new Xbox '720' and Playstation '4' will be powered by whats basically an AMD Fusion CPU/GPU set up.

Looks clear to me where AMD are spending (NEW R & D).

I think this strongly ties in with the above, AMD are going to be doing very well off the back of these contracts for all the next gen consoles, and I think nVidia is panicked a bit, as it's no secret that a lot of the industry don't actually like working with nVidia due to the way they act and their attitude, so it looks like this is starting to bite them on the arse now.

 

[spoffle]

And we are off again.

There isn't really anything wrong with these discussions, as long as everyone can be an adult about it then there's no issue.

I think comments like this certainly don't help though, this sort of subject is something you readily admit to know little to nothing about, but still try to wade in and argue about it, despite admitting you don't really know much about it.

Maybe you didn't mean it in the way I read it though.

Good link Neil thanks and I do like the look of Hawken. Not sure how this F2P works (or what it is)?

Free to play. Basically, nVidia's idea of a games bundle now is games that are free to download, install and play.

They are simply offering a bit of in-game currency with their cards to the amount of £16 apparently.

 

[Twirlywoos]

What a Fantastic Deal.

 

[weehamish]

I like that post Spoffle, i think in a way Nvidia have lost their way.

They have cheesed off WOW and SC2 because they know they are popular, i suppose i would do the same tbh.

But deals like this just show how greedy they are, why not chuck in the new SC2 expansion or wow expansion?

Its better then the above tbh, its not like they are gonna lose anything their cards are way overpriced to begin with.

 

[PorkPieCat]

Every business is there to make money, and no one should begrudge a business for trying to do so, however businesses have to strike a balance on what they're offering for a certain amount of money.

R&D costs aren't something to factor in, and it's not something that they should rely on their customers to reimburse them for, AMD also had R&D costs and claim that their chips were new built from the ground up.

Realistically, each generation of chip from AMD and nVidia are very similar, even if both sides claim it's completely new from the ground up technology. It'll still be heavily borrowing from the previous generation.

I think you're making a few uninformed assumptions on what sort of R&D nVidia and AMD have been doing to develop their latest cards, and the AMD chips have probably changed more so than the nVidia ones anyway.

Kepler is very similar to Fermi, and the games orientated GPUs have been cut down for games only, that's really the biggest difference. I think people's perception of nVidia being greedy is that this is the first time in quite some time, that nVidia have had a smaller GPU than AMD instead of being significantly bigger (Fermi was what, nearly 90% bigger than AMD's chips at the time?) and yet they are still charging significantly more, for less performance and an awful game bundle.

I do believe nVidia are tight, but not in the way others are suggestion, and I think their involvement in games is to the detriment of everyone else, because most of the time when they have some sort of hands on influence with a developer, some drama comes of it.

It kinda hit the mainstream when Batman Arkham Asylum came out and they had a few dodgy things going on there, one was the PhysX use, and the second was the anti-aliasing, where rocksteady/eidos and nVidia couldn't blame the other quick enough, which always shows dodgy dealings have gone on.

The reason I think nVidia are tight is that they seem much more interested in paying developers for advertising and to add dodgy features to games (at the detriment of everyone as above) to make people think their products are better, instead of just putting their money in to their products.




Historically, AMD have always been cheaper than nVidia for the same or even more performance.

Their 79XX release prices were bad, but generally they have been the better priced.

AMD are clearly making a bigger effort to be part of the games development industry, whilst not trying to screw over end users, as well as interfacing with the public about software issues and so on.



I think this strongly ties in with the above, AMD are going to be doing very well off the back of these contracts for all the next gen consoles, and I think nVidia is panicked a bit, as it's no secret that a lot of the industry don't actually like working with nVidia due to the way they act and their attitude, so it looks like this is starting to bite them on the arse now.

if what i keep reading is true, it's kind of interesting to understand the juxtaposition of these two competing companies - and it falls in line with what you said. it seems that amd prefer the rhetoric of performance, overclocking, speed>power draw. they often brings new technologies to the market and so on. while nvidia seem more into influencing things to work in their favour. nvidia seems to release the product that needs to be out in order to sell well beside the competition. they pressure companies to make games work better/use physx, while injecting the nvidia logo into everything (evidently some companies are getting tired of that pressure?). to them, and apparently their customers, the aggressive marketing is enough to justify higher prices in end products.

it's two very different ways to conduct business despite the fact both companies produce basically the same things. not to downplay the arms race but it's not like art; graphics cards accelerate graphics, whether from amd or nvidia. you could argue nvidia is more keen with generating profit while amd are perhaps more enthusiast-oriented? this may be why nvidia's market share seems to be growing while amd's is shrinking, despite the better value for money that the 7000 series represents over the 600 series.

really though this nvidia game bundle is a riot. who at this big corporation came up with it? i dunno, it's probably not meant to be funny but it's so ridiculous... are they fortune 500? they're big anyway. many minus points for marketing.

 

[AndyOcUK]

Some good points well put matey Nice to see some informed opinions rather than fanboy rants....

although:

I think you're making a few uninformed assumptions on what sort of R&D nVidia and AMD have been doing to develop their latest cards, and the AMD chips have probably changed more so than the nVidia ones anyway

have to disagree with the uninformed bit (see profile) although as a gamer and former OcUK Tech Mgr and purchaser I take some your points with the exception of NVIDIA being a "Detriment to gaming".....having brought to the table many of the hardware features that allow your games to look like they do, the "way its meant to be played" programme helps developers a great deal. Interestingly, the man who started it now works for AMD dong the same job My main point is the swiftness of people to scream "AMD are this" or "NVIDIA are that".

For the last 2 years, NVIDIA's developments in cloud, portable gaming, professional graphics and unique features have been good contibutions and i do think attacks based on a game bundle are a little over the top. Both companies are doing good stuff in their own way.

Update: Just fired up Hawken having not known what it was about or ever played an F2P......Really good 1st impression.....like the "walker" sections from lost planet but better and the graphics are very polished.

 

[AndyOcUK]

really though this nvidia game bundle is a riot. who at this big corporation came up with it? i dunno, it's probably not meant to be funny but it's so ridiculous... are they fortune 500? they're big anyway. many minus points for marketing.

Lots of focus with cloud gaming at the moment with shield, cloud server and unified delivery via GeForce experience.....maybe trying to lead from the front early in inevitable tech trends?

Have to say though....Crysis 3 ...[Drool]

 

[ToxicTBag]

Crysis 3 on a titan ... double drool

 

[AndyOcUK]

Crysis 3 on a titan ... double drool

He He. Hey bud....how's the crunching on the 590 going?

Yeah, Crysis 3 is undeniably an awesome bundle title. Reckon it will still run perfectly on my 480's or 7900 cards - probably because Crytek's engines are some of the best in the industry. Even Crysis 2 on PS3 still managed to look bloody gorgeous (goes away and washes mouth out)

 

[PorkPieCat]

i know you were replying to spoffle in your first reply and it's true what you say about people assuming things/making outlandish statements. i'm sure some of the things i've said are the result of reading plenty of fanboy rubbish... but there's really a lot of stuff that leads to looking at amd and nvidia in that light. anyway i defer to your greater knowledge!

Lots of focus with cloud gaming at the moment with shield, cloud server and unified delivery via GeForce experience.....maybe trying to lead from the front early in inevitable tech trends?

Have to say though....Crysis 3 ...[Drool]

hawken does look good, am personally looking forward to it. at first sight it seems a very funny reply to amd's package . i mean, exactly. crysis 3! though cloud... that could be interesting. do you say that because they're all online games that would make good use of cloud gaming? and to add to that some people like the main crysis dev think it's now the era of f2p. so you could be on to something re nvidia predicting trends? new way to look at it certainly. i'm all for shield, and steambox, and grid, and maybe even a new era of pc gaming

 

[bemaniac]

maybe nvidia dont have any nvidia sponsored games coming out. Amd has snapped them all up

 

[bemaniac]

hubba hubba

Amagawd you got a 990X to 5ghz for day to day running Respect

 

[spoffle]

if what i keep reading is true, it's kind of interesting to understand the juxtaposition of these two competing companies - and it falls in line with what you said. it seems that amd prefer the rhetoric of performance, overclocking, speed>power draw. they often brings new technologies to the market and so on. while nvidia seem more into influencing things to work in their favour. nvidia seems to release the product that needs to be out in order to sell well beside the competition. they pressure companies to make games work better/use physx, while injecting the nvidia logo into everything (evidently some companies are getting tired of that pressure?). to them, and apparently their customers, the aggressive marketing is enough to justify higher prices in end products.

it's two very different ways to conduct business despite the fact both companies produce basically the same things. not to downplay the arms race but it's not like art; graphics cards accelerate graphics, whether from amd or nvidia. you could argue nvidia is more keen with generating profit while amd are perhaps more enthusiast-oriented? this may be why nvidia's market share seems to be growing while amd's is shrinking, despite the better value for money that the 7000 series represents over the 600 series.

really though this nvidia game bundle is a riot. who at this big corporation came up with it? i dunno, it's probably not meant to be funny but it's so ridiculous... are they fortune 500? they're big anyway. many minus points for marketing.

Yep, don't get me wrong though, I don't think AMD are a saint, there for the benefit of the gaming community, I'm under no illusion that AMD and nVidia are both there to make profit from the products they produce, I just find that 9 times out of 10, nVidia are doing something that puts me off them.

Some good points well put matey Nice to see some informed opinions rather than fanboy rants....

although:

have to disagree with the uninformed bit (see profile) although as a gamer and former OcUK Tech Mgr and purchaser I take some your points with the exception of NVIDIA being a "Detriment to gaming".....having brought to the table many of the hardware features that allow your games to look like they do, the "way its meant to be played" programme helps developers a great deal. Interestingly, the man who started it now works for AMD dong the same job My main point is the swiftness of people to scream "AMD are this" or "NVIDIA are that".

For the last 2 years, NVIDIA's developments in cloud, portable gaming, professional graphics and unique features have been good contibutions and i do think attacks based on a game bundle are a little over the top. Both companies are doing good stuff in their own way.

Update: Just fired up Hawken having not known what it was about or ever played an F2P......Really good 1st impression.....like the "walker" sections from lost planet but better and the graphics are very polished.

Well, the uninformed bit was because of your bits about their R&D spends, which is incorrect.

So it came across as uninformed (in the purest sense of the word, as that's what it is, you've presented info as fact, that isn't actually factual).

The way it's meant to be played programme to me, is usually a sign that they've paid the developers to do something untoward for the benefit of nVidia solely.

Now I'm not saying that they don't provide benefits at all, what I am saying is that what they do try to push their money in to is to the long term detriment of the gaming industry, if they were to get their way. They absolutely love proprietary technology and try to force it on people as much as they can, and everyone knows that in such an industry proprietary is always doomed to die.

They do a lot of questionable things when it comes to games, the way they have stuff added or removed so that it only benefits nVidia, they're known to be a bully of the industry, which is why I dislike them and the actions that they take.

Some of the stuff they do just doesn't make sense, and strikes me as them not really having a proper long term goal in mind.

When they were on their Ferm GPUs, they were raging about compute performance, CUDA and in game and they go and remove it from their 6 series GPUs. It makes no sense to me.

They've done it either because they realised they were giving people too much by giving them gaming grade GPUs that worked well for HPC, or they don't have a proper direction that they're going in, and are just playing a game of one-upmanship.

I've noticed that they have stopped their insistence on everything having ridiculous levels of tessellation, beyond the point where you'd ever notice it, simply because AMD cards couldn't run it at those levels.

Now, this isn't an AMD apologist rant, because I think tessellation is great, something games have been needing for a long time, but that didn't get in the way of me noticing that nVidia were purposefully getting developers to kill AMD performance by tessellation being at levels far beyond what you could say is noticeable, and in areas where you can't even see it in use.

Now that AMD's tessellation performance has gone right up, and nVidia's compute performance has gone down, they've stopped pushing them both, and what I find interesting is that they pushed technologies that hurt their own performance that was worth more than the increase in image quality.

The tessellation things they got up to actually hurt their performance too because it was unnecessary, it was just a case of it hurting less. What hurts everyone's performance as well is PhysX, and how they use it.

To me, nVidia are like that weird kid on the playground that doesn't play well with others, and while they have good ideas and concepts, they ultimately ruin them by being so selfish and controlling of it, that they die because people lose interest.

 

[AndyOcUK]

My knowledge isn't greater pal..... Plenty who know more than me and yes I think the idea behind this bundle was to look at the way the market will pan out in light of the trends towards cloud gaming. I think what's important to remember here is that it's th DELIVERY of the content that's important, not whether a game is a blockbuster Tier one launch. I personally would prefer. Crysis 3 as I mainly play FPS ( never been into WOW, Skyrim type games) but a LOT of people are. A bundle like this would be a good way of testing the water from a business point of view......if it flops you have learned something and it would have cost less than a blockbuster title.......if it is successful, you can take all the credit for blazing a trail across new ground..... Whaddaya think?

 

[spoffle]

maybe nvidia dont have any nvidia sponsored games coming out. Amd has snapped them all up

I think it's because nVidia are losing the plot a bit, they aren't sure where they need to be focused, so are all over the place.

That, plus as I said earlier, it's no secret that a lot of companies in this industry simply do not like nVidia, and do not like working with them because of how they act, and how they have tantrums when things don't go their own way.

Look at the first Assassin's Creed. Ubisoft implemented a DX10.1 antialiasing path that sped up rendering on AMD cards quite a bit, which put them in front of nVidia in performance.

There was absolutely no performance or visual impact on nVidia for it being there, but nVidia had a tantrum, and the DX10.1 path was removed, reducing the performance on the AMD cards, and the excuse for it was that it was causing visual issues so had to be taken out.

There were no visual issues at all, no one reported or complained about these supposed issues, and the only one to benefit from it being removed was nVidia.

This is what I touched upon earlier when I said that the way they market is by doing things like this, to make people think nVidia cards are better, rather than just putting money in to honest R&D.

 

[AndyOcUK]

SPOFFLE......have to sleep now but sincerely mate.....thank you for a very interesting discussion. VERY rare for an AMD/ NVIDIA thread to yield intelligent debate......usually descends into a completely uninformed fanboy ****ging match by post# 3
Night all

 

[spoffle]

My knowledge isn't greater pal..... Plenty who know more than me and yes I think the idea behind this bundle was to look at the way the market will pan out in light of the trends towards cloud gaming. I think what's important to remember here is that it's th DELIVERY of the content that's important, not whether a game is a blockbuster Tier one launch. I personally would prefer. Crysis 3 as I mainly play FPS ( never been into WOW, Skyrim type games) but a LOT of people are. A bundle like this would be a good way of testing the water from a business point of view......if it flops you have learned something and it would have cost less than a blockbuster title.......if it is successful, you can take all the credit for blazing a trail across new ground..... Whaddaya think?

Personally, I don't think they were thinking along those lines.

The games are free anyway, so it's going to cost them very little to actually provide them as a bundle since they're just offering in game credits, which the developer won't be charging them real world money value for.

I don't even think it's actually about the games specifically, it's just with the AMD cards, with them being games that have a retail value, it adds value to the purchase that you can do something with.

You don't have to be interested in those games to benefit from some form of return. Anyone not interested in Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite or Tombraider could sell the codes for a decent return which is money straight off the card's prices.

This nVidia bundle is nothing of the sort though, and is very much worthless unless you play those games specifically and have interest in the in game credits.

 

[spoffle]

SPOFFLE......have to sleep now but sincerely mate.....thank you for a very interesting discussion. VERY rare for an AMD/ NVIDIA thread to yield intelligent debate......usually descends into a completely uninformed fanboy ****ging match by post# 3
Night all

My pleasure, and I enjoyed reading your posts and debating it with you.

 

[PorkPieCat]

oh no just to add, despite agreeing with a lot of your points of view (if the actual facts are factual), i didn't mean amd are necessarily enthusiasts themselves, more that they target enthusiasts. i'm not too naive i hope, and i know companies are there to make money. and i see nvidia as perhaps just "better at business" ie a "better" corporation. rather than the weird kid analogy. obviously it's not to our (the consumer's) benefit but ultimately if they're good enough, being better at marketing and such can ultimately stifle the competition rather than leading to death for the "superficial" company. as i mentioned before it seems like nvidia's stock is rising while amd's is falling, though obviously that doesn't tell the whole story

derp, just replied to a post about 5 posts ago..

edit: read everything, yeah really the amd bundle is good for selling as well as being just better titles. anyway night then..

 

[spoffle]

oh no just to add, despite agreeing with a lot of your points of view (if the actual facts are factual), i didn't mean amd are necessarily enthusiasts themselves, more that they target enthusiasts. i'm not too naive i hope, and i know companies are there to make money. and i see nvidia as perhaps just "better at business" ie a "better" corporation. rather than the weird kid analogy. obviously it's not to our (the consumer's) benefit but ultimately if they're good enough, being better at marketing and such can ultimately stifle the competition rather than leading to death for the "superficial" company. as i mentioned before it seems like nvidia's stock is rising while amd's is falling, though obviously that doesn't tell the whole story

derp, just replied to a post about 5 posts ago..

The thing is, stock prices doesn't say too much about a company like AMD and nVidia.

AMD is suffering and struggling with their CPU sales, for example but their GPU arm is still very strong but they are still a relatively small company, but their shares wouldn't reflect that, as well as how they have got all the contracts for the next gen GPUs and CPUs.

nVidia is the same, their shares won't really reflect how well their GPUs are doing because there's too much going on. They have a large investment in HPC (high performance computing) with cards such as Teslas and Quadros, as well as their Tegra stuff in the tablet space.

Also, I wasn't suggesting that you think AMD are enthusiasts, I was just clarifying my position in that I wasn't under the the impression that AMD are somehow the good guy that treat the enthusiasts well.

I think AMD have just realised that acting like nVidia does, and having tantrums gets you nowhere when it comes to working with other companies in the industry, so they have taken a different approach, which seems to make sense to me since they have been getting game development sponsorship in lately.

They have effectively gone from barely sponsoring any games, to sponsoring a crap load, and in there are a load of so called "Triple A" game titles, which I think will do a lot for their brand image.

They are essentially doing what nVidia originally did with the TWIMTBP thing, in that if your logo is on as many games as possible, it's going to boost brand awareness massively, and marketing is something AMD have always been pretty poor at.