MSI and Gigabyte seem part of NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program

One of the controversial stories of the past couple of weeks is the news about the NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program. NVIDIA claims this program is transparent and advantageous to gamers, but HardOCP suggests it will hurt consumers and may border on being illegal.

We may be starting to see the ramifications of the GPP. Forbes writer Jason Evangelho reports it looks like Gigabyte and MSI signed up as new AMD GPU products from these two firms are no longer part of the firm's respective gaming brands. The author also backs up HardOCP's statement that no one in the video card industry is willing to talk about this program.

When viewing the MSI products page for AMD GPUs, however, their "Gaming X" branded Radeon cards are conspicuously absent. All that remains are reference versions of Polaris 500 series and Vega cards, or MSI's "Armor" lineup. That's beyond interesting.

...

This week Gigabyte released one for the Radeon RX 580. It is simply called "RX 580 Gaming Box." No AORUS branding is present on the box or the product itself. It's the only perceivable difference. Is this the beginning of that exclusive alignment? Maybe, maybe not. It's not strong evidence, but it is evidence. And more will come.

Well, to be fully transparent, I am not sure we are currently in a position to do any follow-up as NVIDIA has gone dark on GPP along with nearly every contact we have in the industry on this topic. Certainly we struck a nerve. Like the OEMs, I guess cutting off $ hits home.

— [H]ardOCP.com (@HardOCP) March 19, 2018