COPS Geek Squad: NVIDIA & AMD, Busted
Hoo boy, when was the last time we saw a potentially criminal collaboration between two rival hardware manufacturers in the gaming industry? (No, seriously, when was the last time?) Been a while, though. A week ago, when the Department of Justice tag-teamed NVIDIA and AMD with subpoenas regarding an investigation into possible antitrust violations, there was much general confusion and very little information. What happened?
Price fixing, that’s what happened. (Allegedly.)
NVIDIA and AMD (via ATI) have all been accused of antitrust activities, which if proven true would be, well, ugly. The DoJ said:
”[The firms] have engaged in a contract combination, trust or conspiracy, the effect of which was to raise the prices at which they sold graphics processing units and cards to artificially inflated levels.”
Engadget points out that the argument of consistently inflated graphics card prices might not pass muster, but that any kind of super secret special meetings between NVIDIA and AMD/ATI execs might be more damning – especially since the DoJ wants documents that date back to 1990. Will the whole graphics card industry go down in flames, screeching in agony and leaving the world without chips for their PCs and consoles? Probably not. Will we have a lot to read about that isn’t hyping how cool the next generation of vertex shaders will be once games that support the feature are released? Sweet VGA Jesus, I hope so.
NVIDIA, AMD in hot water for potential price fixing [Engadget]
tiny dancer
Posted to on 12 December 2006
Other stuff like this: amd, antitrust, ati, department of justice, graphics cards, nvidia, price fixing
