The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti was not received well by the press. The $399 GPU sold only a single unit on eBay during its debut week in May. The community thoroughly judged the 4060 Ti for its high price tag and dismal gen-over-gen performance. AMD managed to (somewhat) evade the onslaught by pricing the Radeon RX 7600 under $300, but things aren’t looking too good. To ensure a warmer reception for the RTX 4060, NVIDIA has decided to resort to subterfuge.
According to German outlets ComputerBase and PCGamesHardware, NVIDIA has allowed certain YouTubers to publish mini-reviews or “teasers,” if you may, ahead of the official embargo. The catch is that all these teasers solely focus on generation performance gains conferred by DLSS 3 (frame generation) rather than hardware or architectural improvements.
NVIDIA has cherry-picked the games to be tested in these teasers, including only titles with DLSS 3 support, obscuring the hardware-level gains and misleading the average gamer. The worst part about this approach is that it divides the media community. You’ve got two sets of reviewers. One who decides to opt into NVIDIA’s treaty and report only DLSS 3 performance for increased exposure and higher views. After all, ranking among a handful of content creators is much easier than competing with several dozen.
The official review embargo for the RTX 4060 lifts on the 28th of June, giving these greasers multiple days to tip public opinion in their favor. As per ComputerBase, NVIDIA plans to adopt this marketing tactic more often, including more and more influencers with the promise of exclusive coverage.
Here’s an extract from the original Reddit post:
Right now, some YouTube channels are already publishing the first “teasers” of their respective tests of the GeForce RTX 4060, which are not a breach of the NDA. Instead, the corresponding videos and shorts are authorized by Nvidia insofar as selected influencers are already allowed to give a preview of the new graphics card under exclusive permission of the manufacturer – if they focus their reporting on the performance gain via DLSS 3 including frame generation, only compare it in selected games, and only test it with settings specified by Nvidia.
Nvidia consequently plays the content creators off against each other: Those who are allowed to report earlier can be sure of more attention and thus higher revenues. Accordingly, peer pressure is forced, because those who do not report potentially lose viewers to competing channels. For the manufacturer, this approach has several advantages. On the one hand, Nvidia can place effective advertisements via the supposedly trustworthy influencers, and on the other hand, the narrative for the independent tests, which will only be released on June 28, is already set: The first impression is the most important one.
As ComputerBase has learned from relevant sources, Nvidia wants to rely on this kind of exclusive advertising teasers more often and on a broader scale in the future.
Nvidia gets serious and wants to focus the coverage of the Geforce RTX 4060, which will be released on June 29 and is positioned in the lower mid-range, on the possible performance gains due to AI upsampling with DLSS 3 and as well the intermediate frame generator “Frame Generation” right from the start. The chip developer goes new and sometimes dubious ways for this.
Nvidia has allowed selected YouTube channels like JayzTwoCents, Daniel Owen, ElAnalistaDeBits and Chaowanke to publish first benchmarks, but there is a “small” catch. The YouTubers and influencers were only allowed to talk about games handpicked by Nvidia and had to focus on the performance gains due to DLSS 3 and the intermediate frame generator “Frame Generation”.
While the first independent reviews of the Geforce RTX 4060 will only be published on June 28 and thus one day before the sales launch, the manufacturer presumably wants to ensure the best possible first and thus mostly lasting impression. By letting third parties advertise its new graphics card in this way, Nvidia degrades the YouTubers to PR spokespeople and advertising partners.
As already during the entire marketing phase for the Geforce RTX 4060 and Geforce RTX 4060 Ti with 8 GiByte, Nvidia would rather focus on DLSS 3 and Frame Generation in direct comparison with DLSS 2 and less on the tight graphics memory, which AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 also has to offer. It will be very exciting to see if Nvidia wants to establish this kind of questionable “pre-tests” in the future.
