Nvidia kicked off a controversial program when it launched the first Pascal GPU based graphics cards earlier this year, with the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition. Selling its own branded cards ahead of the lucrative early launch period for third parties, featuring an attractive long-awaited next generation GPU, could be construed as taking the cream off the top of the market. However, in a report carried by Taiwan's DigiTimes earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang denied that his company was competing with its graphics card partners.
This summer Nvidia graphics card partners have been concerned about the amount of time that Founders Editions are exlusively available for before they are allowed to launch their own designs based upon the same next gen Pascal GPUs. However, the Nvidia CEO is reported to have insisted that his company "will not step into own-brand graphics card sales". Nvidia Founders Edition cards are produced "purely to solve problems in graphics card design," is the official company line.
Technology behind the Founders Edition cards and findings from its first month of exclusivity are shared with Nvidia partners, noted Huang, allowing them to make improvements and changes to better suit their target markets. It's hard to deny that the best profits from a long-awaited next-gen product occur around launch time but we have seen some more patient and sober PC enthusiasts on HEXUS forums regularly repeat: 'wait to see the third party versions of this graphics card before buying'.
In another news nugget, in the same DigiTimes report, apparently Nvidia has started to ship its GTX 1050 based graphics cards and vendors will start to announce related products in late October.
