Arez in or Arez out? Asus clarify AMD graphics card brand mix-up

Last month, Asus unveiled a brand-new range of AMD Radeon RX graphics cards under the name of 'Arez' - you know, like the god of war Ares, but cooler and with a 'z'. Fast forward to last night, and you may have seen some wild rumours flying about saying that Asus have actually canned their new Arez brand in favour of their classic ROG moniker after a suggestive tweet from a vaguely official-sounding Asus Arez Twitter account. Thankfully, Asus have stepped in to clear up the confusion.

As with most things on social media, it's all turned out to be complete hogwash - maybe even 'fake news' if you will. No, Asus aren't putting the kibosh on a new brand they created little over a month ago (mainly because that would be silly), and no, it's got nothing to do with Nvidia binning their GeForce Partner Program, either. Glad we cleared that up.

Indeed, Asus were quick to rectify this sorry mess, suspending the offending Twitter account in question and issuing proper, official statements proclaiming that Arez is still very much alive and that anything to the contrary is definitely not legit.

In some ways, however, the fake tweet did make a bit of sense - which is probably why every tech site on the planet fell for it. With Nvidia having now discontinued its increasingly controversial GeForce Partner Program, which rewarded third party graphics card manufacturers for aligning their various gaming brands with Team Green (and was also alleged to have resulted in withheld GPUs if they didn't, according to a report by HardOCP), the need to have separate brands for Nvidia and AMD doesn't really exist anymore.

Admittedly, it was never really clear which third party manufacturers participated in Nvidia's partner program in the first place, as most of the info from HardOCP's report was made anonymously. However, Asus' Arez announcement (not to mention MSI's new Mech 2 series of AMD graphics cards) certainly seemed to suggest that they were one of the select few that did.

Either way, you can rest assured that the future of today's best graphics cards will remain stuffed to the brim with even more mind-boggling brands and naming conventions and 'z's replacing 's's than we know what to do with, because this is what we now live for, apparently. Thank you, Asus, for making our lives a better, richer place.