In case you missed it, Icrontic relayed a report detailing an exchange between an unspecified NVIDIA source and TweakTown’s Shane Baxtor regarding the Radeon HD 5870.

In the piece, Baxtor claims that NVIDIA PR emailed TweakTown to snoop on whether or not they had received review samples for the Radeon 5870 graphics card from rival AMD. Baxtor went on to say that NVIDIA had a few bullet points that they felt the journalist should hit when reviewing the rival company’s card. Baxtor felt he would be best serving his readers by forwarding the inquiries to AMD PR for rebuttal–frankly a maneuver to be commended. AMD subsequently responded, and made for some interesting reading as a result.

It all appears to be the typical game of Silicon Valley ping pong, but then, something curious happens. Yesterday morning, TweakTown posted an update:

“UPDATE - NVIDIA’s PR company for Asia Pacific in Singapore, CIZA Concept, has contacted us and claimed that the source of the questions was from them as “our observations, as industry watchers” and not NVIDIA. We always get these types of questions and they seem to read like they are from NVIDIA, so we are unsure. We were asked to state this in this news post, which has been done here.

We were also contacted by phone about this by NVIDIA and we have offered them the chance to do a follow-up. We are in the process of preparing questions and will have them answered early next week in a new news post.”

The plot thickens! Today NVIDIA’s Senior PR Manager Brian Burke engaged me on Twitter. His response more or less directly contradicted the TechTown piece, stating that DirectX 11 was in fact a good thing for gamers. Intrigued, I asked Mr. Burke for an official statement. I also asked him if he was aware of the source of the original comments.

Did NVIDIA or its Asian PR firm ask TweakTown to consider their points for TweakTown’s Radeon 5870 review? Did Burke actually think AMD’s moving forward with DirectX 11 was somehow punishing gamers? Here is his reply:

We checked with our Asia PR team and they assured us that they did not send out these questions.

Pushing technology forward is one of our core beliefs, which is why we push to innovate even when no standards are available yet. We want people to have the best experience possible with their games.  This is why we focus on adding things like PhysX and 3D Vision to PC games. We also support DX 11 and all industry standards.

DX11 is a very good thing. Anything that makes the PC gaming experience better is great. Our next generation GeForce will support DX11, PhysX and 3D Vision so gamers don’t have to compromise.

In essence, NVIDIA says that they do not know who TweakTown’s source is, and TweakTown more or less admits that they don’t have a clear understanding where the communication came from as well.

As we look deeper to uncover the truth of this finger-pointing, I have contacted TweakTown’s Shane Baxtor who has advised simply to “stay tuned.”