EVGA retracts PrecisionX 15 download - issues a statement

Over the past few days our findings as posted in our article received and created a lot of feedback from the community, both positive and negative. In our article we identified that EVGA for the bigger part cloned Rivatuner. A lot has happened since then as you guys have been able to read and follow.  We have more details and a statement after the break.

Two or three days ago EVGA Precision X 15, regardless of our article and warning to EVGA, was published. As you can imagine, it wasn't well received. All over the web discussion started as to how EVGA handled and dealt this entire ordeal. Though we never claimed that EVGA stole code, yesterday things took a serious turn for the worse as traces of 'rivatuner' had been found inside EVGAs "100% own written" PrecisionX 15, this was exposed by a 3rd party who decompiled EVGA's PrecisionX 15 and the Rivatuner core application. We just received word from EVGA that they have decided to take down PrecisionX 15 as download (this will take a few days for steam apparently) and that they will go back to the drawing board with their utility.

The take-down will be temporary as they will do what we suggested days ago to EVGA in their forums, redesign the utility in such a manner that it doesn't look like a cheap clone from the Rivatuner core base and featureset. After that has been done and accomplished, they will reintroduce the utility -- this time in a new jacket and hopefully without any "rivatuner" references in their programming.

Guru3D Publishing can appreciate and respect EVGA for this decision, then again we'd like to make very clear .. they should have done so in the first place. EVGA reached this decision after a hail-storm of criticism from our and many other, including their own, overclocking and tweaking communities. To confirm what we have been notified on, EVGA just issued us the following statement. We do feel a bigger and wider apology to Unwinder the Rivatuner author would have been in place as the basics of this statement mostly remain denials and even a contradiction or two:

PrecisionX 15 Statement

We understand that there is a lot of confusion and misinformation in the internet community about Guru3D’s article titled “Did EVGA just Steal the Rivatuner RTSS design concept into PrecisionX 15 ?”. We would like to clarify the following:

1. Precision’s original main GUI concept was designed and provided to the community by EVGA in 2008.
2. The RivaTuner control panel and backend code in prior versions of Precision were developed and is owned by the RivaTuner developer. EVGA does not own the source code for any RivaTuner code. EVGA paid for the development and distribution rights per the contract.
3. The new EVGA PrecisionX 15 was coded from scratch by EVGA without copying any of the RivaTuner code.
4. Both RivaTuner and EVGA PrecisionX 15 make use of the NVIDIA NVAPI to communicate with NVIDIA graphics cards and drivers, which is owned and provided by NVIDIA.

Some people mentioned that the file structure in EVGA PrecisionX 15 is similar to the previous version of Precision. During development, we referenced the USF skin format (which has been published by RivaTuner developer at Guru3D forums in 2009 http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=3316361&postcount=8 to allow the community to create their own skins). The above mentioned feature would make it simple to allow users to recompile any previous skins to work with the new version of PrecisionX 15. However, we do understand the confusion caused by trying to maintain this feature and we will change it in the next release.

Next, it was also mentioned that the code contains text references (not code) to the word “RivaTuner” and the word “RTTSH.dll”, a RivaTuner file. This actually came from the user interface localization / help (wording). During the original Precision development, EVGA worked with several outside firms to help translate user interface help files into various languages, unfortunately this is a misprint in the translation files and will be fixed. Again, no RivaTuner code was ever used in EVGA PrecisionX 15. We apologize to the RivaTuner developer for this error.

Originally our goal was to add more features such as 64bit OSD, Steam, updated voltage controls, and more to a new version without changing the Precision user’s experience that they were already familiar with. Unfortunately, the “similarities” between the two programs have led people to believe that EVGA might have copied the code and design from RivaTuner, which is not the case.

Given the circumstances, in order to remove any questions and to further differentiate it visually from the previous versions of EVGA Precision, EVGA has decided to listen to the community and suspend the downloading of EVGA PrecisionX 15 temporarily while these updates are being implemented.

Thank You,
EVGA