Nvidia own mockery of a bad product release (2003)
In 2003, Nvidia released a humorous video mocking itself over a flawed product launch, acknowledging the launch issues of its GeForce FX 5800 Ultra graphics card. The parody video, titled "Nvidia own mockery of a bad product release (2003)," shows the company poking fun at the card's high noise levels and performance problems that had drawn criticism from reviewers and consumers.
Background
- This video is a leaked 2003 internal NVIDIA skit titled "Team Green's Excellent FUD Campaign," mocking ATI's (now AMD's) launch of the Radeon 9700 Pro, which had just dethroned NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti 4600 as the fastest graphics card.
- In the skit, NVIDIA actors parody ATI's marketing as desperate, misleading "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), while grossly over-hyping their own unready NV30 (GeForce FX) chip — which would later famously arrive late, run hot, and underperform against ATI's next-generation Radeon 9700/9800 series.
- The sketch became infamous in hardware enthusiast circles because NVIDIA's mockery of ATI ironically foreshadowed NVIDIA's own troubled GeForce FX 5800 launch (notorious for its noisy "dustbuster" cooler and poor DirectX 9 performance).
- It captures the cutthroat PC graphics wars of the early 2000s, when GPU generations traded the lead every 6-12 months and companies openly ridiculed each other in internal videos that later leaked online.