Is there a deeper meaning behind this? Is it likely to imply that stock is low/late? Or do manufacturers sometimes scuttle review programs when the card underperforms expectations? Does anyone have a sense of how unusual this is and what it’s likely to mean? The article does a good job reporting the facts, but doesn’t offer much analysis of them.
They might decide to seed review units to fewer reviewers for any reason, but in the past every time they’ve had reviews embargo’ed until release, the card was trash. This makes sense really, if the card is good then you want people to read a review, be excited and buy a card. But if the card is bad, you want people to remain excited, buy it on release before looking at reviews.
To me, this screams that Nvidia thinks their card isn’t really a compelling offering at that price point, and that reviews would point this out and negatively impact sales. Of course once the card is out you can’t control reviews, so the embargo gets set at release (the reviewers still get cards early but can’t talk about it).
This is definitely a PR thing. The 4060 Ti was universally panned, as was the 4060. They aren’t seeding units to reviewers this time around because they know that 90% of the review is going to be pointing out that the extra 8GB of ram doesn’t help a card with the same memory bandwidth as a GTX 780.
deleted by creator
