Is there a deeper meaning behind this? Is it likely to imply that stock is low/late? Or do manufacturers sometimes scuttle review programs when the card underperforms expectations? Does anyone have a sense of how unusual this is and what it’s likely to mean? The article does a good job reporting the facts, but doesn’t offer much analysis of them.
They might decide to seed review units to fewer reviewers for any reason, but in the past every time they’ve had reviews embargo’ed until release, the card was trash. This makes sense really, if the card is good then you want people to read a review, be excited and buy a card. But if the card is bad, you want people to remain excited, buy it on release before looking at reviews.
To me, this screams that Nvidia thinks their card isn’t really a compelling offering at that price point, and that reviews would point this out and negatively impact sales. Of course once the card is out you can’t control reviews, so the embargo gets set at release (the reviewers still get cards early but can’t talk about it).
This is definitely a PR thing. The 4060 Ti was universally panned, as was the 4060. They aren’t seeding units to reviewers this time around because they know that 90% of the review is going to be pointing out that the extra 8GB of ram doesn’t help a card with the same memory bandwidth as a GTX 780.
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I think this is the context I was missing. I haven’t followed hardware developments closely enough to know that the 4060 series had a history of poor price/performance, or to extrapolate that to the likely implications here. Thanks for catching me up.
From what I read on released specs, it’s pretty underwhelming for the price especially compared to the previous gen
That single quote could basically capture this entire generation.
Praying that intel can actually drive more competition and make GPUs exciting again
I imagine it is more to do with the number of junk reviews people do. I don’t watch much in the way of reviews, but just tried researching for a workstation. Most video reviews are worse reads of marketing nonsense than the company’s hype image landing pages.
Looking at people doing stuff like benchmarks on CPUs that space is nonsense junk data too. I don’t have a CS degree but even I know about CPUset isolation for processes, how the CPU scheduler works. The results from the way most people are running benchmarks are not well thought out or reflective of the ways software can run on the hardware.
That is definitely a new and strange take. Knowing Nvidia I highly doubt that is the reason.
This is only a couple weeks after most outlets reported on the shallow fart that was the 4060 launch.
I’m almost all cases where companies restrict review units or have release day embargoes it is because they are expecting lukewarm or worse response.
I don’t think Nvidia has done anything recently to deserve such a charitable view
You should watch gamersNexus.
I love me some Steve Burke. Especially those times where he sasses out on tech companies’ terrible decisions.
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