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NVidia, AMD Subpoenaed In Antitrust Investigation

Posted by Zonk on from the business-of-making-shinies dept.

mustardayonnaise writes "CNN Money is reporting that graphics chipmakers Nvidia and AMD (who recently acquired NVidia rival ATI) said Friday that they received subpoenas from the US Department of Justice as part of a probe into potential antitrust violations involving graphics processing units and cards. Each company controls about 25% of the entire graphics chip market. According to the article, Intel, who makes their own fair share of graphics chipsets, has yet to be included in the investigation."

1 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Also investigate MS XBox / FOSS driver issues by Osty · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Is is just a coincidence that both Nvidia and ATI were each awarded Xbox contracts (Nvidia = Xbox, ATI = Xbox 360)? Perhaps there was some behind the scenes deals to thwart the development of FOSS graphics drivers.

    Right, because the motivation couldn't have been wanting to get a top-notch GPU at an affordable price from a company that knows how to build GPUs successfully. Nope, it was just one more salvo in Microsoft's covert war against FOSS.

    I'm sure the switch to ATI chips in the 360 from nVidia chips in the Xbox had nothing to do with nVidia wanting more of the pie than Microsoft was willing to give while ATI was willing to sell their IP so that Microsoft can do what they like with it in the future (such as integrating it into a 360-on-a-chip at some point in the future, a problem Sony's going to have down the road when they try to build a slimline PSThree and find out that they can't merge chips due to nVidia's licensing agreement ...). Instead, I'm 100% positive Microsoft decided to switch to ATI just so they could spread around their patents to foil FOSS development.

    With the top two graphics chip companies controlling the majority of the market, this could have happened. Perhaps the "patented code" in the drivers that prevents them from opening the source is Microsoft-owned?

    It's surely a possibility, considering that Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, and others all collaborate on the design and development of DirectX features (since many features are useless without hardware support behind them). However, it's more realistic that nVidia and ATI have their own proprietary IP and patents that could severely hurt their business if competitors got their hands on them. For example, how do you think it's possible for nVidia and ATI to get performance increases from several-year-old GPUs with nothing more than a driver update? Oh, wait, conspiracy theory: obviously nVidia and ATI intentionally hinder the performance of their GPUs so that they can slowly trickle out driver updates that will add incremental performance increases. For free. Because that makes sense.

    I know that it will never happen, but it would be nice to bring it up just in case someone is listening.

    If you installed your tinfoil hat properly you wouldn't have to worry about people listening to your thoughts ...