Nvidia Ends Notorious GeForce Partner Program

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Nvidia put a fork in its now infamous GeForce Partner Program, citing recent negative commentary as the primary reason for the abrupt cancellation.

The statement is the company’s first official response to the alleged foul play that was  first brought to light back in March , with several outlets reporting that the program puts an unfair burden on its partners to align their gaming brands exclusively with Nvidia.

Several AIB partners rebranded many of their AMD-based graphics cards a short time later, with Gigabyte dropping its Aorus moniker from its RX580 Gaming Box and Asus  renaming its entire AMD GPU lineup. AMD made a direct respons to the surging reports of the implications, giving more credibility to the claim that the GPP could be having an effect on how vendors brand their respective gaming products.

Nvidia claimed in its blog that it’s shutting down the GPP because it would prefer to cancel the program “rather than battling misinformation.” The company further dismissed the allegations of wrongdoing by claiming that the program was quite transparent, and that no bad blood existed between Nvidia and its AIB partners:

With GPP, we asked our partners to brand their products in a way that would be crystal clear. The choice of GPU greatly defines a gaming platform. So, the GPU brand should be clearly transparent – no substitute GPUs hidden behind a pile of techno-jargon.

Most partners agreed. They own their brands and GPP didn’t change that. They decide how they want to convey their product promise to gamers. Still, today we are pulling the plug on GPP to avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we’re doing to bring amazing advances to PC gaming.

Although the cancellation of the Nvidia GPP may give those who already believe that the Green Team is pure evil all the confirmation they need that the program was indeed toxic, the surge of negative press coverage over the ambiguity of the published guidelines could just be enough of a headache for Nvidia to throw in the towel, and one could hardly blame them.