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So, rumours started about 2 weeks ago of nVidia offering a new 'incentive' program to its Add In Board/ 3rd party manufacturers whereby nVidia co-opts their graphic card gaming brands (MSI Gaming X, Gigabyte Aorus, Asus Republic of Gamers etc) as exclusively nVidia in return for, well, basically the manufacturer getting timely stock, preparatory samples, shout outs and support from nVidia etc. With the strong implication being that if you don't sign up then said samples and stock, support etc will go to those who do sign up. This was largely met with a wall of silence and a rather Orwellian blog post response from nVidia that features the word 'transparency' 5 times without actually saying anything, and is so transparent they haven't said anything else and have a strict NDA so nobody else can talk. It should, perhaps, also be noted what happened to XFX when they had the temerity to start making AMD video cards- no more nVidia support for you! And eventually, no more nVidia cards at all. Bit of a Chilling Effect for anyone thinking of resisting the GPP. Anyway, fast forward two weeks and what do we find? No more Aorus AMD cards, no more Gaming X AMD cards, no more ROG AMD cards. Indeed, we have the rather amusing sight of Gigabyte claiming their "Gaming Box" is not branded Aorus because... it isn't for gaming (in german, relevant part as my best attempt "Computerbase has contacted Gigabyte as to why their new 'gaming box' Radeon RX580 lacks the "Aorus" branding. The maker replied that the focus of the product was not on gaming. However their marketing for the product claims "Turn your Ultrabook to gaming platform[sic]" and "Upgrade your game experience".) So, why is that a big deal? Basically, idiots people pay lots of money for the 'Gaming' brand name even if the product is identical, and nVidia is (almost certainly illegally, asterisk equivocation) co-opting their brands for its own use. This is massively anti-competitive since AMD is locked out of gaming brands for discrete graphics cards from most of the big AIB makers and it also targets the new Intel/ AMD processors/ iGPUs* which will not be able to be branded as 'Aorus/ ROG' etc in notebooks. That's a big deal for everyone, since if there's no competition nVidia can and absolutely will gouge worse than RAM manufacturers currently are- and at least there are three of them. And if they're strong arming partners when there is competition it will be orders of magnitude worse when there's literally no alternative. (Note, I freely admit that nVidia is one of the few companies that I outright loathe so I'm far from unbiased, but it is for these sort of reasons. There will be far more 3.5/4 1060 3gb/ 6gb and similar shenanigans when there ain't no competition) *and allegedly there's a 'full' AMD Ryzen 'APU' coming with equivalent to 580 performance based on the xbox1x gpu as well, but it ain't announced.