NVIDIA Apologizes, 'Walks Back' Threat to Withhold GPUs From Reviewer

This week NVIDIA threatened to stop providing GeForce Founders Edition review units to reviewer Steven Walton, who runs the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (and is also an editor/reviewer at TechSpot). NVIDIA had complained "your GPU reviews and recommendations have continued to focus singularly on rasterization performance, and you have largely discounted all of the other technologies we offer gamers. It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do."

NVIDIA's email to Walton had said that henceforward their review products would instead be allocated to other media outlets "that recognize the changing landscape of gaming and the features that are important to gamers and anyone buying a GPU today, be it for gaming, content creation, or studio and stream."

But TechSpot reports tonight that "Less than 48 hours later, Steve received the good news. Nvidia apologized and walked everything back."

Great news indeed, but let's be clear this wouldn't have happened if not for the support of the community at large and key people in the tech space that have such an enormous influence that it was too much for Nvidia to ignore. Linus from LinusTechTips (his angry rant on the WAN Show embedded above is pure gold) and Steve from Gamers Nexus, were two of those persons.
And unfortunately, by then TechSpot had already composed a scathing takedown of NVIDIA's email:
As a corporation, it's Nvidia's prerogative to decide on the reviewers it chooses to collaborate with. However, this and other related incidents raise serious questions around journalistic independence and what they are expecting of reviewers when they are sent products for an unbiased opinion...

In today's dynamic graphics hardware space, with 350W flagships, hardware ray tracing, and exotic cooling solutions, there's a wide range of data points Hardware Unboxed looks at. But at the end of the day, there's only one real question every GPU buyer wants to know: how well do games run on a particular piece of hardware? Considering that 99% percent of Steam games feature raster-only rendering pipelines, rasterization performance was, is, and will be, a key point that Steve considers in GPU reviews...
[M]ost games (including almost all RTX titles) are built on raster renderers. A hypothetical graphics card with most of its die space reserved for ray tracing would run Quake II RTX great and... not much else. Ray tracing absolutely deserves a place in modern GPU reviews. But there's simply not enough of it in enough games for any responsible reviewer to put it center-stage, in place of raster performance. It wouldn't do justice to consumers, who will primarily be running raster workloads. This is why Nvidia's complaint is so puzzling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.