In classic me fashion, I swanned off for a few days just as another graphics card fracas has spilled out into public view. At the centre this time is the previously unassuming RTX 5060, which you may have noticed is due for launch today yet only has a handful of “hands-on previews” to tell you how big of a graphics it does. Allegedly, that’s because Nvidia have been keeping hold of the drivers needed for full reviews, only providing them at the eleventh hour to press outlets that have previously run these previews. No preview? No review, at least until the drivers release publicly later today, and what’s more, the same reports say that these previews were only offered under strict testing provisos set by Nvidia themselves.
According to VideoCardz and Hardware Unboxed, the mandated test conditions supposedly range from only allowing certain games for benchmarking – judging from the previews currently online, these were Doom: The Dark Ages, Avowed, Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel Rivals – to the more egregious demand that RTX 5060 performance figures would focus on DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation (MFG). And, in turn, would only be compared to results from older XX60 GPUs that lack DLSS frame gen support entirely.
“We worked with a few chosen media on previews with a pre-release driver,” an Nvidia spokesperson told me this afternoon. No comment on the review driver situation, other than a 5pm BST release time, was given.
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun
RPS was not invited to take part in these previews, and I can’t imagine agreeing to such terms if we were. Although it doesn’t appear that Nvidia required previewers to give positive RTX 5060 takes, with several highlighting the shortcomings of its 8GB VRAM limit, the limited game selection and emphasis on frame-genned performance versus the much older RTX 3060 and RTX 2060 Super are clearly intended to push a particular narrative: one that at best downplays the drawbacks of frame generation and at worst misleads readers with an unhelpfully narrow view of relative performance. GameStar, a German site that took Nvidia up on the offer, said in their preview that the GPU giant even specified the in-game settings that each game should be tested with.
The sense that a big, green thumb is pressing down on the critical scales is deepened by the alleged trading of earlier review drivers for a compliant preview. Even if, by that point, reviewers are free to use their own, independently-set benchmarks, the initial wave of RTX 5060 reviews will come from publications that Nvidia has – accurately or otherwise – deemed more friendly than others. Those who refused the locked-down previews, and have thus demonstrated less of a willingness to go along with the desired messaging, will be forced to wait before sharing impressions.
I can’t claim absolute moral superiority here because again, I wasn’t invited, and thus didn’t have the chance to send a “Thanks but no thanks” email (even I hadn’t simultaneously been too busy recovering from gin-assisted groomsman duty). Still, yeah, not a fan.
I have recently noticed Nvidia PRs becoming unusually pushy about how great it would be to test such and such frame generation in such and such game, but functionally those have only ever been suggestions, and I’ve never faced even a veiled hint at retribution for ignoring them in my reviews. Nonetheless, I now find myself in the bizarre position of having had physical possession of an RTX 5060 for nearly a week (posted by Zotac, with no strings attached other than to please not lose or break it), yet don’t have the software means to test or appraise it on the day of release. Like, man, at least Bethesda didn’t send us copies of Starfield while they were withholding the activation keys.
Watch on YouTube
More disturbing still is that this isn’t even the only accusation of editorial manhandling to be laid at Nvidia’s feet today. Big-deal tech YooToobers Gamers Nexus claimed in a video (above) that Nvidia have, with varying levels of subtlety, threatened to cut off their interview access to Nvidia engineering staff in response to a perceived lack of focus on DLSS and MFG performance testing in their reviews. Gamers Nexus have, in fact, produced multiple long-form vids on these topics specifically.
It isn’t unheard of for, nor technically outside the rights of, companies to pick and choose who gets primo access for coverage. In tech media especially, there may even be a minor, ethically unbothersome quid-pro-quo involved: attending a virtual briefing, for instance, in exchange for getting onto the review list. But there’s a honking great difference between asking journalists to sit through a thirty-minute slideshow and, essentially, demanding editorial jurisdiction over how their products are evaluated. Nvidia, one of the richest, most powerful firms on Earth, should know better – and should have at least had an idea that being caught fiddling with the independent review process might cause more damage to the RTX 5060 than a few variations of “It’s not much faster than the 4060, is it?”
