First and foremost, NVIDIA has demanded that its AIBs tell NVIDIA who will be reviewing the AIB's custom RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards. We were forwarded emails from other reviewers, from the AIBs that were asking specifically, at NVIDIA's direction, "Who will be performing the review content?" "What is that person's phone number and email address?" That is a bit odd, as we have never seen this before in 20 years of reviewing video cards. AIBs in the past have been left to pretty much operate their own review campaigns on new video cards, but that seems to have come to an end. From these lists of reviewers submitted to NVIDIA by the AIBs, NVIDIA has put together its own list of "approved reviewers," and sent their approved list back to the AIBs in order to let them know who they are allowed to sample review cards to. Much like NVIDIA exerted control over AIB's and OEM's brands with
GPP, it is now exerting control over who the AIB has review its own custom cards.
This is where it gets a bit more interesting, and likely should give you concern with any leaked benchmarks you see on the web. NVIDIA is not allowing its AIBs to distribute drivers with their review cards. For a reviewer to have access, he must first sign
NVIDIA's multi-year NDA (which is fine if you are "just" a card reviewer), then he will log into a protected site which is most likely a secured version of GeForce Experience in order to obtain the driver, and download from there into a specific machine with the new RTX card being present. If you are seeing any benchmarks between now and the ~20th (we think the 2080 launch and 2080 Ti launch will be split on different days possibly), you are likely not seeing cards benchmarked with its launch driver. So keep that in the back of your mind as you see performance leaks come forward.
