NVIDIA Ramps Up Battle Against Makers of Unlicensed GeForce Cards

erek

erek

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"NVIDIA has outlined a simple guide to a potential customer, in order to avoid the purchase of an ersatz graphics card. It first recommends that the buyer only consider the latest GeForce RTX 40-series, due to Ada Lovelace architecture debuting after the collapse of cryptocurrency, therefore GPUs from that range are not heavily associated with mining activities. The second suggestion is to only source a card from an official partner - prime examples for the Chinese market are ASUS, Colorful, Gainson, GALAX, Gigabyte, Injoy, MSI, Zotac, Renaissance, ASL, Maxsun, and Yeston - the customer will also gain a proper guarantee via these companies. The third and last bit of advice is aimed at a customer who does not have the budget to reach for the RTX 40-range - NVIDIA recommends only purchasing newer SKUs based on its Ampere architecture, with good candidates in the GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X models.

It is encouraging to see NVIDIA's new focus on eliminating unlicensed products from online retailers, but the endeavor has only targeted one regional market. The Chinese hardware sector is massive and hard to regulate, but the distribution of counterfeit and poorly refurbished cards has spread internationally. This is not a brand new problem, but Team Green will need to address it in order to fully satisfy its customer base."

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Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/306688/nvidia-ramps-up-battle-against-makers-of-unlicensed-geforce-cards
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Interesting. I had no idea this was a thing!
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Yeah… Linus has a video where he builds a PC from nothing but Alibuy or some crap like that and gets something like a 660 badged and boxed to look like a 1650 super or something I didn’t watch it but I remember lots of “that’s why you don’t order from China this always happens” comments.
Work station cards are a big one too, so many fake T1000’s floating around “new” on eBay and stuff it’s more a problem now just because of the huge used surplus in China and they have the facilities there to do it.
 
Lot of Fermi and Kepler era low end cards sold as newer cards. They even put fake stickers on them, sometime a box, sometimes even mess with the BIOS to make it look like whatever they are trying to scam it as when you pull it up in GPU-Z.

But then you unravel that, or pull the cooler off and it's a GTS 450 or something.
 
Lakados said:
Yeah… Linus has a video where he builds a PC from nothing but Alibuy or some crap like that and gets something like a 660 badged and boxed to look like a 1650 super or something I didn’t watch it but I remember lots of “that’s why you don’t order from China this always happens” comments.
Work station cards are a big one too, so many fake T1000’s floating around “new” on eBay and stuff it’s more a problem now just because of the huge used surplus in China and they have the facilities there to do it.
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Seems like it would be pretty obvious once you plug them in and they show up as a different GPU than you paid for once you install the drivers.

That's what buyer protection is for.
 
Armenius said:
This has been going on for at least a decade at this point. TechPowerUp added a detection algorithm to GPU-Z for this issue back in 2018.
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I would have thought you'd just pop it in, and once you install drivers it would show up as the GPU it actually is.

Are you saying they are able to make the GPU misrepresent itself? That's trickier.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I would have thought you'd just pop it in, and once you install drivers it would show up as the GPU it actually is.

Are you saying they are able to make the GPU misrepresent itself? That's trickier.
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That's exactly what they do. The key is looking at the nitty gritty details in GPU-Z like Shader number, bus width, bandwidth, etc. They just make the "Name" read whatever they want it to look like.
 
kirbyrj said:
That's exactly what they do. The key is looking at the nitty gritty details in GPU-Z like Shader number, bus width, bandwidth, etc. They just make the "Name" read whatever they want it to look like.
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Not just the name, but the amount of VRAM reported is also spoofed.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Seems like it would be pretty obvious once you plug them in and they show up as a different GPU than you paid for once you install the drivers.

That's what buyer protection is for.
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It’s obvious, but it’s still a shitty time.
 
Lakados said:
Yeah… Linus has a video where he builds a PC from nothing but Alibuy or some crap like that and gets something like a 660 badged and boxed to look like a 1650 super or something I didn’t watch it but I remember lots of “that’s why you don’t order from China this always happens” comments.
Work station cards are a big one too, so many fake T1000’s floating around “new” on eBay and stuff it’s more a problem now just because of the huge used surplus in China and they have the facilities there to do it.
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10 year old cards with new stickers and firmware that shows a different model number at boot time are old news. This appears to be them just rebadging OEM only cards for retail and repackaging laptop parts in desktop form factors.

I'm mildly surprised the intermediate situation where mining only cards built on previous generation designs aren't showing up rebadged as consumer parts.
 
I feel this is more to counter China cards that repurpose mining cards than to stop GTX 660's being labeling as a GTX 1660. It's pretty well known that China likes to take an old forgotten GPU and label it as a new GPU, even according to the BIOS.
 
DukenukemX said:
I feel this is more to counter China cards that repurpose mining cards than to stop GTX 660's being labeling as a GTX 1660. It's pretty well known that China likes to take an old forgotten GPU and label it as a new GPU, even according to the BIOS.
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I also feel there is a second side to this, Nvidia and AMD, but mostly Nvidia are getting their sales hammered from the massive overabundance of used stock on the market, the stupidly high volume of GPUs sold to miners over COVID have mostly been dumped for second-hand sale around the world and according to some publications that used supply is nearly on par with how many new sales either team would expect to have made in years prior, so if true there is a near 100% overstock on previous generation parts. Nvidia can't release a $300 4000 series GPU that performs on par with a 3060 when you can buy a "new never mined with" 3060 online for $200, both AMD and Nvidia are stuck trying to compete against their own previous catalogs which exist out there at supply levels never before encountered. The mining craze fucked them over now that it's gone bust, I don't see this getting better until the supply of those used parts dries up, so Nvidia wants those parts gone.
But they don't want them gone for our sake, and it's not so they can lower prices that's for sure, they want them gone because as long as those parts are in AIB or retailer warehouses they aren't placing new orders, with orders down they have to increase prices to maintain revenue streams sure, but the stock price will still take a hit when they have to report that shipments are down further than expected because their partners aren't ordering, investors know you can only squeeze so hard for so long before you've wrung it dry.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Seems like it would be pretty obvious once you plug them in and they show up as a different GPU than you paid for once you install the drivers.
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LIke the poster above you said, they modify the BIOS sometimes so that the card reports it's newer than what it really is. Sometimes they'll even scour the writing off the GPU chip and etch something different on there. Most of the tech tubers have mentioned this in the last few years.
 
Good luck. Without enforcement from the Chinese government, nVidia will be able to do little to stop this.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Good luck. Without enforcement from the Chinese government, nVidia will be able to do little to stop this.
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They will go after the the vendors who bought the initial silicon then offloaded it. Nvidia has rules on reselling their silicon, so they can work to shut down those avenues. NVidia does actively work with the Chinese government they have custom silicon they have worked to develop that gets China what they want while not running afoul of the plethora of rules the US has imposed on them.
China as a whole is currently working on the huge knockoff industry that exists there as it has ballooned to a point where they themselves have an issue. There was a number of recent incidents where their own projects exploded or failed spectacularly because they themselves accidentally purchased and installed fakes that didn’t hold up.
 
Lakados said:
They will go after the the vendors who bought the initial silicon then offloaded it. Nvidia has rules on reselling their silicon, so they can work to shut down those avenues. NVidia does actively work with the Chinese government they have custom silicon they have worked to develop that gets China what they want while not running afoul of the plethora of rules the US has imposed on them.
China as a whole is currently working on the huge knockoff industry that exists there as it has ballooned to a point where they themselves have an issue. There was a number of recent incidents where their own projects exploded or failed spectacularly because they themselves accidentally purchased and installed fakes that didn’t hold up.
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Bingo.
But even this has its limitations. Not many know this, but the Galaxy company was 100% started with gray market GPUs. Not a single GPU was sold directly to Galaxy from NVIDIA. The company they were buying those from was simply buying enough GPUs in China that NV basically got told to go pound sand. NV at the time could not afford to lose the legit company as a client.
 
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