New reports have emerged regarding the possibility of Gigabyte’s partnership with Nvidia for its GeForce Partner Program (GPP). For those who are not aware, GPP is basically a new ‘initiative’ made by Nvidia to aid its partners in terms of support for marketing/engineering activities and early access to new technologies. It seems that the effects of this program is beginning to surface.
Prior to this, there were concerns raised by HardOCP’s Kyle Bennet regarding the negative impact of this program. Bennet, speaking to several unnamed representatives from different graphics cards manufacturers, discovered that most of them see the GPP program to be somewhat illegal/unethical. Why? Because GPP allegedly requires Nvidia partners to only associate their “gaming” brands with GeForce products and not AMD’s.
Remember Gigabyte’s recently launched RX 580 Gaming Box, which we wrote about a few days ago? We were intrigued with the fact that this external graphics enclosure did not come with the Aorus branding (Gigabyte’s premium gaming brand). In contrast, the similarly designed GTX 1080-based external graphics enclosure was bestowed with the Aorus branding and is still officially known as the “Aorus GTX 1080 Gaming Box.”
Those aside, it remains to be seen whether this program will affect the performance and quality of future custom Radeon-based graphics cards. There are rumours that both MSI and Asus are also participating in the Nvidia GPP program.
(Source: “evernessince” TechPowerUp Forums)
