Nvidia bans Hardware Unboxed over their focus on Rasterisation over Ray-tracing

The whole situation it's weird, the e-mail from the PR guys reads almost as a mob dog whistle, "If you make a honest review that doesn't align with our marketing goals, you better be prepared to be blacklisted."

Yes, Nvidia it's free to not "give" cards to anyone they don't want to. But that's not the problem, it's the "wink deal" of "Just to be clear: This it's not a honest sharing of our hardware with the press to review it, it's a bribe, in exchange to say wherever we want you to say", and then use the same media words as testimonials in their website as a Marketing Material.

Hardware Unboxed is one of my favorite Youtube channels to go to when I want to see benchmarks on a new GPU or CPU. They usually have the broadest variety of devices and games.

Unfortunately when it comes to GPU, there are reasons like ML and NVENC which makes it extremely hard to go with AMD. So Nvidia can do such moves without getting much punishment by consumers. Hopefully AMD can get more competitive in these areas as well so that we have more choice.

Rasterization performance is still a huge function of a GPU, while RTX being a new feature and arguably a selling point against their competition, I don't see why they should put more emphasis on a gimmick that is far from being mainstream.

Some more context - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXn9O-Rzb_M&t=2424s