PRO Hi-Tech, a Russian hardware channel, has claimed via Telegram that NVIDIA doesn’t want its board partners launching Arc Battlemage GPUs and will go so far as to ban any that ultimately decide to team with Intel for these next-generation graphics products. The original message is in Russian, but a translation comes by way of Modest Anonymous on VideoCardz’ comment section, who described the move as “horribly anti-competitive.”
A little bird told us that Intel is already looking for partners to produce their next generation graphics cards, of course in China. But as soon as they turned to well known top tier manufacturers, and it became known to NVIDIA – NVIDIA began to threaten its partners that if they collaborated with Intel, NV would not work with them anymore and they would not get the dies.
You have to remember that it already happened, only with AMD. Back then NVIDIA stipulated that their video cards and AMD video cards couldn’t have the same branding, you had to name them differently. An uproar ensued, ASUS for instance had already created a separate brand, and NVIDIA backed out under public pressure.
So, now the story has gotten even worse. Top tier GPU OEMs, apparently, will not sign a deal with Intel and the company is looking for second tier partners. The public, had it known about the situation, could have shamed NVIDIA this time around, but the situation is developing behind the closed doors, at the level of company relations and I got to know about it accidentally, thanks to an employee of the company that apparently will sign a partnership with Intel. The Intel partner is unlikely to speak up and reveal the damning truth.