Nvidia RTX: Did Tom’s Hardware go full shill?
Never go full shill
When I die, my last thoughts will be about how much time I spent not having ray tracing in my life. At least that’s according to Tom’s Hardware editor Avram Piltch.
On August 24th, 2018, Piltch penned a rather baffling article regarding Nvidia’s new Turing GPUs, titled “Just Buy It: Why Nvidia RTX GPUs are worth the money“. What follows is a rather long winded explanation on why the new cards are the best thing since sliced bread. Not only that, but that people complaining about the price are nuts.
Life is short. How many months or years do you want to wait to enjoy a new experience? You can sit around twiddling your thumbs and hoping that an RTX 2080 gets cheaper, or you can enter the world of ray-tracing and high-speed, 4K gaming today and never look back. When you die and your whole life flashes before your eyes, how much of it do you want to not have ray tracing?
Piltch goes on to explain that technology gets cheaper over time, and that we should expect to pay a premium for riding the cutting edge. He uses an analogy of Apple’s first flat panel monitor, which cost $1,999 over 20 years ago, but now you can get the same thing for $150. Which is certainly true to a degree. However, then there’s this tidbit.
When you’re among the first to purchase a new architecture like Nvidia’s RTX cards, you take the risk that the technology won’t work as well as advertised right away, that you won’t find a ton of titles that support its special features and that the price will drop, making you feel like you wasted your money. However, when you pay a premium for cutting-edge components, you’re also buying time, time to enjoy experiences.
That sets off some pretty big red flags in my book. Could we have another GeForce FX or Vega on our hands?
He continues by taking every legitimate concern people have made and spins it to seem as if everyone is just making tempests in a teapot. Given the language used in this article, I’d be genuinely shocked if this wasn’t paid for, let alone written by Nvidia’s PR department. Especially since it directly contradicts another article by Tom’s writer Derek Forrest from August 23rd, that advised buyers to wait before purchasing these expensive RTX card. Piltch even acknowledges this, and calls his own staff member a “price-panicked pundit”.
The fact of the matter is that Forrest is the correct one here. We don’t know whether or not these RTX cards are worth the huge 72% price jump over Pascal. They might surprise everyone and live up to Nvidia’s claims. However, taking their word at face value is just idiotic. Because no major tech company ever has overstated the performance of their newest shiny.
Tom’s has long been accused of being biased towards Intel and Nvidia. At least as long as the 15+ years I’ve been PC building and modding. However, this certainly takes the cake even in today’s media environment, where bad tech journalism is rampant. Blindly recommending a product without even having it hands-on, let alone doing testing or benchmarks to back up performance claims is, simply put, dishonest and hurts the publication’s credibility.
In the meantime, I want to reiterate what I said in an earlier article. Wait for independent reviews and benchmarks before you purchase anything.
Image by flayer99 from the PCMasterRace subreddit.
