This is something that Joe and I have been talking about for a while and I have finally decided to make a public comment. The combination of the latest video card releases and the E3 coverage should make it clear to everyone that the PC hardware/gaming industry is pretty damn slimy. Am I the only person who cringes at the thought of hiring strippers to stand around mostly naked to try and generate interest for a computer game? Does anyone else feel a bit concerned that the supposedly impartial online reporters of hardware and gaming news are out drinking and carousing on the expense accounts of the companies they are being impartial towards? Let’s take NVIDIA for example. Free drinks and topless porn star at their “exclusive E3 party”. Sure, this is the wet dream of most teenage boys, but is this really the way that serious corporate entities behave? Is this how news reporters are entertained (god I hope not). And I fear that the attitude of “we’ll just give these geeks what they want and they will continue to be cheap marketing tools for us” is both pervasive and effective in our industry. After all, if you look around at the PC hardware scene it is by and large just free marketing and advertising. Four-five pages of info ripped directly from the manufacturer’s site, a few pictures of your free expensive hardware, and then some benchmarks. Oh well, you can’t fake benchmarks, right? So we’ll just skip the intro and go right to the graphs.
Let’s think about that attitude for a second. You CAN skew benchmarks to report anything that you want to. Take a suite of apps that are optimized for some card more than another. Take a particular operation that favors a certain architecture. When in doubt, the manufacturer can give you some guidance on what benches to run and with what settings.
Here’s an example. I do this ALL the time at work when I want an analytical instrument that is a bit more expensive than another one I don’t want. Ask the mfgr and they are more than happy to provide specs that lock you into their brand. So even the numbers are pretty malleable if one is so inclined. Since that is the case, then integrity of a web site is the only thing consumers have to go upon. This is a site’s most precious commodity, and one would expect reader memory to be very long in the event of deception. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case at all in practice. Sites that have been busted for breaches of trust (
www.hardocp.com and
www.tomshardware.com LEAP to mind) continue to be the most popular spots on the web for hardware news. Reminds me a little of Reagan’s “Teflon” public image.
Look at the latest NVIDIA video card release; the GFFX 5900 Ultra. The card looked pretty nice, but my spidey sense started going haywire when I noticed something about the reviews. They weren’t shitting bricks at the price tag! $500US is way out of my price range, and I have more disposable income than the average teenager or college student gamer type. $500 buys you an Xbox, a GameCube, and a PS2, or any one of those consoles and a new 27” television to play games on. How can one consider such an expensive video card without taking its price tag into account when reviewing the card for an enthusiast site?
While on the topic of the NVIDIA card, I found it amazing that a larger deal wasn’t made out of their
3dmark “optimizations”. Think about the NV35 launch from NVIDIA’s perspective: they are in a position of needing a top end video card. It isn’t optional now; the NV30 flopped and this is do or die time. And (surprise!) their drivers just HAPPENED to not render everything in 3dmark and boost scores artificially as a result? It was just a bug. I laughed out loud when I read that response. Most other hardware sites just downplayed the issue rather than making a big stink: Kyle Bennett and HardOCP went even further by actively defending the “accidental fortuitous big” story. He of course tried to change the topic to the motives of Extreme Tech, who did excellent work in exposing the driver cheats. That is a pretty old method of spin doctors; when you can’t kill the message then muddy the reputation of the messenger. Nonetheless, the fact remains that driver enhancements gave NVIDIA an inflated score to make them look good at a crucial time. Kyle’s comments about the motives of ExtremeTech and the accidental nature of the score inflation make him look even more like a (marketing) tool than normal; no one with half a brain would buy that it was accidental. What is he trying to sell? Oh yea, $500 video cards to teenagers (and ad space to mfgrs). Almost forgot.
Caveat lector by the way means let the reader beware in latin. This is good advice to everyone. I have a three year old who immediately wants every product he sees in ads on TV. Marketing and advertising is pervasive in our world, and masking advertising as objective reviews is a pretty effective way to sell your product. Look at a website’s history, look at the correlation between their advertisers and the reviews that they write, and be intelligent. Don’t only look at what is said about a product, but what is not said and conspicuous in its absence. DO BE CRITICAL. They are after your spending money, after all.
And to nip things in the bud about MY motives. I am not jealous that other sites get money and hardware while I do not. I have all the computer stuff I need and a monthly budget quite capable of keeping my LAN upgraded. Even if I were sent tons of hardware, I wouldn't have the spare time to review it. I look at my time as my most valuable commodity, and benchmarking and comparing a lot of video cards or motherboards frankly is a bit of a bore and not high on my priority list. I DO have an agenda though. I wish the PC enthusiast community would grow up a bit and see when they are being used.