Nvidia CEO Jensen Juan should be getting on stage right about now and he's going to be talking about something different from us. We will be talking about how we feel like Nvidia has been threatening the media with access or at least us. How it builds relationships between the press and engineers and then later uses those to manipulate the media and how its executives throw its own employees under the bus whenever the press exposes something like this. Jensen, we'll be talking about artificial intelligence and burying the RTX 5060 launch. For the last 6 months, Nvidia has been pressuring us under threat of access to include MFG or multiframe generation 4X on charts alongside devices that don't even support it, even though we've said that it's not a like for-like comparison and that it would be an unfair misrepresentation and outright lie to even do as much. We've also heard from much smaller media how Nvidia has slithered into their DMs to offer samples under specific guidelines. At this point, we think it's time to share some of this to protect those smaller outlets, but also make sure consumers are aware of what Nvidia is doing behind the scenes in what we thought was a transparent and open communication with engineering and what has become something we think is more sinister. And uh I guess this this might destroy the possibility of working with Nvidia at any point in the near future because it is a kind of scorched earth approach, but that's the GN Chef special. Scorched to earth. Intel's been on the list. AMD's been on the list. Nvidia's been on the list and off the list and on the list and off the list and on on the list and they're on the list again. Now, Nvidia's restriction of the newest RTX 560 review units and drivers is interesting where they're not distributing drivers until launch day, but it's not special. Today is about, in our opinions, Nvidia's malignant poisoning of the media by creating a facade of open access to its people and then using those people like poker chips to subversively try to advance a certain narrative, even though it already controls 90% of the market. And less than ever, Nvidia has needed to engage in subtle manipulation. And yet more than ever, we feel that they're trying it and that they decided to try changing editorial direction with us of all of the outlets made us talk to other media outlets to learn about their experience of it. And we'll have some of that later in the week as well. Now, in order to continue to be allowed to talk to thermal engineer Malcolm and technical latency expert GMO, both of whom are audience favorites and people we greatly enjoy working with, we've been informed that we need to talk more about multiframe generation, especially MFG4X, and include MFG4X on charts, even with cards that can't feature it. Uh, and Nvidia wants to reinforce we think Jensen's lie, where it's committed to making sure that 5070 equals 4090 is true. Maybe there's a concern of a future class action or something and they want to create a paper trail to try and say that actually it is true. With increasing boldness, Nvidia has stated to us that they might not be able to keep letting us interview Garmmo and Malcolm if we don't produce reviews the way Nvidia executives want them to be produced. Now, us doing exactly what Nvidia asks, even though it's in direct opposition to what we believe is right for the consumer, would be a breach of trust and it would be lying. Sort of like what Jensen did when he said this 4090 performance at 5.49. We brought you this video with store.gamersac.net and 10% off coupon code IDGAF as in I don't give a You can apply it to our GPU paper launch t-shirt which shows a legally distinct GPU entering a shredder to be turned into a nice green piece of paper. It's possible that Nvidia applies this particular brand of retribution to us today. And so to continue supporting our independent reporting, head over to store.gamesex.net and grab one of these t-shirts in a 100% cotton or comfortable tribe blend, you should also check out our modm mats, including our new BStock modmat listings for a more affordable large variant and our ever popular GN15 large PC building anti-static modmats. Our project and soldering mats are also available in blue, green, red, and yellow and offer a thick, high heatresistant surface for any kind of project with easy cleanup. Consider also our new tabletop gaming dice kits like the e-wasta inductor dice with embedded inductors within them or the snowflake the cat dice. These are high quality sharp edge resin dice for tabletop gaming with a fully custom wooden box bearing the GN Alchemy logo. Each coming with its own card in the style of popular card games. Head over to store.gamearensex.net to support us directly. And remember, use code IDGF for the next few days only for 10% off. Nvidia seems to view review relationships like some kind of quid proquo and expects that it's supposed to get something in return for them other than just the product review itself. And AMD actually used to be like that too back before it fired all the worst executives that were enforcing that approach. So because Nvidia believes that this is purely transactional, we'll first prove a point. We've produced a ton of content about FSR, DLSS, and MFG. In fact, we've produced 71 minutes of content explicitly covering MFG and DLSS4 with in-depth testing, frame-by-frame comparison of frame generation, and technical analysis. Some of it was positive. Our 5090 review was 40 minutes long. The tearown was 29 minutes long, meaning that our MFG and DLSS in-depth testing actually is longer than our 5090 review content. If we had included MFG and DLSS coverage in the 5090 review, it would have been under 4 minutes and something else would have been cut. But it's never enough for Nvidia. Nvidia wants MFG4X in the charts of the reviews themselves and in the reviews. Here's the bigger problem. Nvidia has created a situation where you can't trust the independence of any MFG or DLSS coverage because of the way it's pushing these constant threats of access to hardware or in our case the uh not even implicit but the straightup explicit statements that interviews with people like Malcolm or GMO are possible if we include things like MFG in the reviews. So they have undermined the integrity of any of that coverage. I personally cannot look at anyone's review where they talk about MFG or DLSS without wondering if they got the same talk we did. And that's a problem, especially now that you all know about it. So, Nvidia told us that adding MFG and DLSS reviews was necessary to quote secure budget to have Malcolm and Gummo technical interviews on thermals and latency. Uh, even though they do not pay us. In fact, I paid tens of thousands of dollars now to fly out to their venues and their offices to cover those things. It was our cost. Our budget was the only budget in this entire conversation. And they're talking about securing budget as if this is somehow a paid exchange. out. I don't know if that was a Freudian slip where maybe they pay other people for coverage like that, but whatever the case may be, that was how it was delivered to us where in order to continue doing these types of interviews and for them to quote secure budget, we had to cover things a certain way in the reviews that were totally unrelated to the people we were even interviewing. It made no sense. But they know we don't take money for them. So, I have to wonder if they view these interviews through a lens of thinking we view it as a monetary gain, such as through the other ads that are run on them, as some sort of big transaction, the way Nvidia looks at everything. And if that's the case, then it's just plain dirty. But either way, even ignoring this misrepresentation of so-called budget, we already have over an hour of content on MFG and DLSS, and it's still not enough for them. Possibly because it wasn't purely positive. But we won't capitulate because if you give Nvidia an inch, they'll take a mile and their drivers don't even work anyway. This whole thing is bizarre though. Malcolm is a thermal engineer. He has nothing to do with MFG. And to be clear, we are almost certain that he has no idea he's being treated as a poker chip by Nvidia's upper command. We like Nvidia's acoustic, thermal, and latency engineers and have friendly rapports with them. We find them to be honest and intelligent without being marketers. The information is genuine and comes from a genuine place. I would absolutely love to continue working with Malcolm and Gummo, but that's what makes this so gross from Nvidia. Nvidia is now undermining even that trust with its engineers by poisoning the well. It seeps into the ground and it can't be removed. We can't trust Nvidia's motives for anything now. And at this point, you shouldn't either. And frankly, it's disturbing how many times Nvidia brings up Malcolm's name specifically when we talk about MFG and charts because again, he's a he's a thermal engineer. He makes fans and metal make things cold. That is what Malcolm does. He does not make fake frames and then put them onto charts and then lie and claim that a 5070 is a 4090. So I assume that the reason they keep bringing him up specifically in this nonsequiter is because they know we like working with him. And that again just makes it even dirtier because Nvidia sees this opportunity of he doesn't seem to give a if we take away the cards. What if we take away access to the people the audience likes and the people that Steve likes working with? Nvidia has accurately identified that if our GPU sampling is cut, we'll just get the hardware a different way and they won't be a part of the conversation. That's their decision to make. If they don't want the opportunity to say anything at any point in a review, they don't have to have that opportunity. We can go get it. We'll do the testing ourselves and we'll proceed as normal. So, instead of trying to use something of less value as leverage, Nvidia has pinpointed that we get along well with engineers. Our audience likes them and the content is great and unique. But why stop at good content for the brand when you can weaponize it to extort a certain directive? There's a lot of big words in that sentence. So that means that's the right way to do it. Frankly, if Nvidia is viewing this as quit proquo, then Nvidia should be absuckingly flattered that we've spent as much time as we have covering things like their thermal solution and doing so positively because I think it's actually brilliant. That is how much we liked it. I will in this video still give them credit for the things that they've done well, but it was genuinely fun to work on. We had multiple videos calling it good. We included Schlle and imaging, which nobody else did, and we included specialized acoustic testing, which I'm also fairly certain nobody else did in that level of detail. But again, it's not good enough. It is not good enough to do these things. You also have to talk about the rest of the narrative that they want to talk about. and to be in media doing testing on hardware with such limited time before a review goes live. The whole point is that everybody does something that the other people aren't doing. That's the cool part about it. But Nvidia doesn't get that. Nvidia seems to want a concerted push on their narrative and it always wants more. It is never enough for Nvidia. By threatening access to interviews and hardware, Nvidia has created a scenario where all of the intentions have to be questioned. And that can even include hours if people don't know about this, which is why we have to expose it now to make sure everybody's aware of exactly what's going on behind the scenes because Nvidia has dirtied what was otherwise a clean and fun seemingly transparent look at their hardware. But that transparency apparently was not the only intent. It was coming with a price. And we to maintain the transparency will be uh sharing all of that with you because we're not going to let Nvidia use this as a cudgel to dictate how we cover things. That's up. I went off script. Nvidia is undermining all the DLS how to send into MFG content by doing this. And I'm certain that for many of our peers, just like for us, they looked at the technologies. That's the Nvidia bike going by. They're trying to make sure you can't hear me. Many of our peers probably looked at the technologies because they were genuinely interested in it. But you still have to look at it and wonder what was going on behind the scenes. And was it the same as it was for us? And again, this is a problem for Nvidia. Uh, and I'm not sure they even thought about it that way, which is a big issue. So, for example, I spoke with Hard Run Box. I know Hard Run Box genuinely wanted to cover the MFG and DLSS technology and their intentions were good. Hard Unbox though is interesting and will come up later because they got a talk similar to the one we just got years and years ago for similar editorial direction standpoint on reviews. But the problem that emerges is now every reviewer is looking at this video going, "Oh, I have to now justify that I actually talked about this stuff because I wanted to, not because Nvidia told me to. So, it creates this cascade of issues all from Nvidia. Nvidia is well known in the industry for being vindictive, not just towards media, but its own partners. EVGA left loudly because of it, and we had exclusives in our coverage of that. But over the years, every board partner we've spoken to has been terrified at one point or another of Nvidia's visceral reactions to innocuous things. When I fought Nvidia over this editorial direction push that they've been pursuing in our calls, which uh I've recorded and I am prepared to release if I have to because Nvidia was also recording those calls and both parties were aware that Nvidia was recording those calls because they were calls for the press. Just to be clear, Nvidia, I I am prepared to release them if I need to reinforce my statements today. Uh but in those calls I repeatedly pointed out that this whole thing of pursuing a certain editorial like pushed narrative that creates a transparency problem. And a different Nvidia representative stated uh my transparency is that I give you a card to test and review. That's my form of transparency. Which is like okay but you didn't though cuz you didn't send a 5060. And for the people who did get it the drivers aren't public anyway. So, first of all, off for even saying that. Uh, and secondly, it's not even true. The off part's not in the script. But our contacts are good people. And so, we've wondered where all this is coming from. The answer is from the top. We asked other people, not our contacts, and particularly former insiders and found that executive level decisions from three people are landing on PR around the world to force their media. Nvidia's misleading demands of MFG4X inclusion in reviews would help it to avoid the problem that has now, which is that its products aren't improving as much as the price is increasing. But even if someone wanted to add that data to reviews, Nvidia often only gives reviewers three to five full days to review a card, sometimes a week if we're lucky. And then there's the fact that its own drivers are currently so up beyond all recognition or the fooar drivers as I call them that even enabling MFG or DLSS in some games with some settings causes them to crash or the system to shut down. So it's already physically impossible to do all the tests that we do in that time and yet add more and then it doesn't even work sometimes anyway, which would mean we take other things out which Nvidia would also be mad about. But that doesn't matter because we don't produce reviews for Nvidia to be happy about them. We produce reviews for people to buy products or not buy products or buy competing products. That's what we do as our service. And so, uh, from Nvidia's viewpoint, we basically need to change our editorial direction. And pressuring us isn't going to work. But it's also not the first time Nvidia's done this for people. The last time they chose other Steve from Hard Run Box and back then it was only the access to hardware they threatened which Steves don't care about because Steves can get the hardware from other Steves in the industry. Frankly, I think they're discriminating against Steves because we're at a two for two hit rate on Steves who have been threatened by Nvidia. But we've also learned something interesting. The last time this happened, back when Hardun Box was told to adjust their editorial direction to include more focus on technology that wasn't ready for prime time, we learned that allegedly the directive came from the top, one of three people, and was forced down through media contacts. We also learned from numerous former Nvidia employees that the executives have a culture of throwing people under the Jensen bus which adds a new layer of deceit to the whole approach because now instead of access to a simple physical hardware product and instead of also adding this sort of sort of damicles over the reviewer of access to interviewing and engineering discussions, it also has the third run which is that anyone in the media with a conscience is going to wonder how exposing something like we're doing today is going to affect the messengers who are given the message to send to us when it goes back up the chain and they have a who did this to me conversation. So I know these demands aren't necessarily coming directly from the representatives who work for Nvidia and talk to us. We think it's coming from above them. And to try and prove this theory, I went and I spoke to a ton of other media you all likely know from all around the world. And I learned that in all these regions there is a consistent theme of this background pressure of covering certain things in a certain way in reviews. And that is a global thing for Nvidia which we think means it really narrows it down to the top of the top because this is not some like rogue American PR thing. This seems to be a company culture thing. And when this is seen at the top, I want to make sure that the uh executives don't have the ability to just blame the people below them. That's why I emailed one of them. Matt Webbling, the head of GeForce Marketing, immediately tried to put his employee in front of him as a shield when I sent an email saying we need to speak on record. We told our contact to please stay out of it and pushed Weblin for answers on a recorded call because he's an actual executive who has control over some of this stuff. And we wanted to speak to someone who has the full and accurate picture of what happened internally to go over how they're doing this. Again, it's just like when we spoke to ASUS at Computex last year, the first thing they do is put someone in marketing in front of us. Nice guy, not the right guy. and we kept pushing until we could get the director of something to try and get answers. And that would be what we were doing here. But Weblin stopped responding for a week after I told PR to stay out of it. So, we replied to acknowledge that his response was loud and clear and that we'd communicate his thoughts to his customers. We also anticipated vindictive sampling actions, so we've preempted that. Let's take a walk down memory lane. In 2018, Hard OCP broke a story about the NVIDIA GeForce partner program, which was described as follows. Quote, "The crux of the issue with the Nvidia GPP comes down to a single requirement. In order to be part of GPP in order to have access to the GBP program, its partners must have its gaming brand aligned exclusively with GeForce." That was a quote. I've read documents, said Bennett, with this requirement spelled out on it. "What would it mean to have your gaming brand aligned exclusively with GeForce?" Honks for the GeForce partner program here in Taipei. Quote, "The example that will likely resonate best with hard OCP readers is the ASUS Republic of Gamers brand. I have no knowledge of ASUS is a GPB partner. I'm simply using the ROG brand hypothetically. If ASUS is an Nvidia GPB partner, and it wants to continue to use Nvidia GPUs in its ROG branded video cards, computers, and laptops, it can no longer sell any other company's GPUs in ROG products. So, if ASUS wants to keep building Nvidia based ROG video cards, it can no longer sell AMD based ROG video cards and be a GPU partner. End quote. On that one, as an example of what we think is vindictiveness, in 2020, Nvidia tried to restrict hardware and box access to GPUs because they weren't frontloading and heavily emphasizing ray tracing testing, which hardware box maintained was because the technology simply wasn't ready yet. That was their opinion. We'd agree with it as well, especially in that era. But Nvidia didn't care. And for the internet out there, look, we we get it. We get that Nvidia makes more money with AI than it does for gaming. And that by simply selling a gaming GPU, it's giving away money. But if it wants to abandon gaming, it should just do it. It's okay, Nvidia. It really is. If you want to just leave gaming and make all the money from data center and enterprise, you can do that. Just don't it up for the rest of us on your way out the door by trying to manipulate how the coverage is handled. And it almost reminds me of the SGI situation which is out of business now. And SGI only sold GPUs for the most part to enterprise data center and B2B. They didn't think that consumers could really afford GPUs or would have a use for them. Jensen Juan founded Nvidia with some others and pursued consumer graphics and built the company that it is today. If Jensen wants to repeat that history and go only B2B, that is totally fine. And it might not even repeat this time. It might be that B2B is big enough now that he can maintain a B2B only company and not do gaming. So it's not the are gamers still being sold to thin that's the problem for us. It's the manipulation that's the problem of it. It's the threat that's handing over people like us when it has these conversations. If Nvidia wants to cut off its nose despite its face, they can do that by disallowing further well-received, highly reviewed, neutral to positive technical interviews with their engineers. But if Nvidia instead is going to threaten us on the fulcrum of a particular type of coverage, then we believe that starts to become a form of extortion. And we think that Nvidia made a calculated play here where Nvidia realized if it takes away access to cards, it doesn't do a whole lot. Taking away access to money doesn't do anything because they don't give us money. But what if it takes away access to the things that generate money through separate channels like just through YouTube AdSense? Maybe that'll work. That's how I felt receiving these messages. And just to be clear for our audience, again, referring to the coupon code 10% off on store.camers nexus.net. I don't give a what Nvidia does for any of that because we're going to continue on just the same. I would love to bring you all engineering content and interviews and let them tell their story in a way that's educational and actually useful for people. If Nvidia doesn't want to be a part of that, that's fine. They can off and do whatever they want and we'll keep doing our thing. Ultimately, that's why we have audience support from you all, so we could do stuff like this. So, anyway, at some point, enough is enough. And that's true for consumers, too. And to keep that thought in mind of enough is enough, I'll leave you with a message from the late Gordon Ma, my friend and mentor, who once said this at this very location in Taipei. Internet, you will disagree. You will piss and moan in the comments all day. You will cry about it, scream about it, go on Twitter and Reddit and no and then you go to buy your Nvidia card and the internet because I know you right now is like, "Yeah, this is like I only care about value, you know, f you Nvidia." You know what's up with the prices? Oh, I'm sorry. We're in a restaurant.