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3dfx/NVidia Lawsuit Continues 51

Posted by Hemos from the fight-to-the-graphic-death dept.
AFCArchvile writes "Here's the article on how 3dfx has "received favorable rulings" in the 5-patent lawsuit salvo it received from NVidia. In retaliation to the suit, 3dfx now "plans to file for summary adjudication of infringement.""
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3dfx/NVidia Lawsuit Continues More

3dfx/NVidia Lawsuit Continues

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  • 3dfx is getting favorable rulings on the multitexturing patent. Strange, since NVidia was on ARB 2 years before 3dfx was inducted. Who will win on this one? The Patent Offices and the courts? Or ARB?

    We'll find out today! On BATTLENERDS!

  • "I'm getting a little fahklempt!....Tawk amongst yourselves!.....3DFX just gained a favorable ruling in their lawsuit! Discuss!....
  • What does this say about the cards? If 3DFX was to come out on top in this suit, would NVIDIA have to issue a truncated version of their drivers discluding the parts in question ? The reason I switched to nNVIDIA from 3dfx was that 3dfx's Linux support was questionable and performance was not nearly as high as my friends using NVIDIA cards. I hope this doesn't change.

    JB
  • I see a lot of company bashing here. As if an attack on 3dfx or nVidia is a personal attack on you.

    Lets say that you invent something, then your neighbor steals the idea and makes a million from the sales of your idea. You whining little kiddies would scream bloody murder on the way to the courthouse to sue the pants off your neighbor.

    You'd do even quicker if you had patents on your work.

    So stop throwing around trash, start thinking and stop taking this crap personally.

    Whats it to you anyways?

    Is
  • "...more like pathetic. The drivers for my Voodoo 2 were awful."

    You seem to have this tendency to use your experience with three year old technology and drivers as the basis for your assertations.

    My Voodoo 5500 consistently gives me over 80 fps under linux, and that is with only one processor in use. The other processor will be coming along shortly.

    "One big reason for NVidia's great performance is how they're constantly optimizing the drivers. "

    And if you did any research into the DRI, you would see constant messages on their mailing list discussing the work they're doing. In fact, One of the development cvs branches is showing a doubling of speed with GL apps.

    Ranessin
  • The patents aren't global to multitexturing, they cover the specific way that mutitexturing units (texelfx) can be chained to apply n textures to one surface.

    Plus, although NVidia may have been on the ARB before 3Dfx, 3Dfx has Gary Tarolli, who pretty much invented OpenGL :)
  • The original 5-patent infringement lawsuit made it to Slashdot. It seems only fair to follow up on this.

    Then it belongs in slashback. (I wonder what the abbreviation should be for that... /^H? Perhaps /ESC[2 (or B, was it?)

  • nVidia's market cap is extremely inflated, mostly due to hype about their alliance with MS. When MS actually starts shipping their game console and investors realise how razor thin nVidia's margins are on that product the stock will tank faster than RHAT and CORL did.

  • "My Voodoo 5500 consistently gives me over 80 fps under linux..."

    in Q3A...

    I'm now getting b/w 35-50 fps in UT, depending on the level.

    Ranessin
  • Lego® is a registered trademark; trademarks are adjectives. It's "Lego blocks" not "legos[sic]".
  • You seem to have this tendency to use your experience with three year old technology and drivers as the basis for your assertations.
    I use three year old technology as a comparison because designing the Linux drivers should've been a cakewalk. Designing a Linux driver set for the V2 could very well be a lab for a graphics driver class; it shouldn't be so hard. By the way, exactly what application gave you over 80 fps? Did it have a polycount of over 25,000 triangles? If not, then you obviously have the same mental problems and insecurities that ballot stuffers do.

    As for the NVidia drivers, aren't you in the least bit intrigued that I found out how they optimized the performance without looking through the DRI to ruin the surprise?

  • Emacs Cheat Sheet

    ^X ^F: open; ^X ^S: save; ^X ^C: quit
    ^Space: start selection; ^W: cut; Alt+W: copy; ^Y: paste
    ^S: search; ^H t: start a tutorial

    See, it wasn't that hard.
  • Once you have the idea finding the way to implement it is the easy part, doing the implementation is most of the work. And 3dfx has promised there are ways of implementing multitexturing without infringing on their patents.

    IP isnt about fairness of course, having developed something on your own does not excuse you in the eyes of the law.
  • "I think that NVIDIA was relying upon previous work (by other people) or patents that they own as showing that the 3dfx patent is invalid, etc."

    No, they're not at that stage in the trial yet. This is equivalent to "findings of fact." Basically, at this point, there is no dispute that Nvidia and 3dfx are using the same techniques, and that 3dfx got the patent first. The next step is the summary adjucation, where a judge determines if there was prior art to 3dfx's example, how patent law applies, and makes an award.

    Josh from Penstar Systems made a great post on this on the 3dfx board at The Motley Fool, and a lot of my understanding of this comes from his posts (JoshMST on the Fool's boards).
  • "True - but it isn't supposed to create an instant monopoly for as long as you want to pay lawyers to talk to judges..."

    That's hardly what's happened in this case, isn't it? What's happened since the Voodoo2? Nvidia leapfrogged 3dfx, that's what happened. And if you believe 3dfx's side of the story (which is very plausible) it was due to the fact that Nvidia took multitexturing technology without paying for it, and thus were able to focus R&D efforts elsewhere.

  • Re:it's an update to a previous story. (Score:3)

    by AFCArchvile ( 221494 ) on Monday October 16, 2000 @06:15AM (#702110)
    The original 5-patent infringement lawsuit made it to Slashdot. It seems only fair to follow up on this.

    If you're complaining about the story being so 1-sided, just kick back and relish the thought that Slashdot was designed to make 1-sided stories 2-sided. That's the entire purpose behind the Comment system.

  • You compared a gforce2 to a voodoo 2 and wonder why the geforce2 won, the voodoo 2 is quite an old product compared to the geforce2, thats why. I think that 3dfx should definitely win this one. we do not want nvidia becoming too sure they will be on top or the quality of their cards (and therefore everyone elses) will seriously degrade.
  • ...though I can't quite see how NVidia fits into it all. I consider myself a hybrid Geek, since I live in a family of technophobes. True, geeks don't put enough documentation into their programs; blindly assuming that a help system can be avoided by using 4 simple letters in a certain sequence (you know, R-T-F-M). I would've used EMACS more if I even knew how to navigate the menu system; to quit, I could only ctrl-alt-del out of it!
  • The fact that there was some form of legal judgement is news. And it does belong on slashdot.. I was mostly referring to the link, where it looks like a regular news story.. Of course, it is MSNBC, what should I expect?
  • Aureal filed lawsuits against Creative. Aureal went bankrupt. Creative bought Aureal.

    Like you say, problem solved, in a money-grubbing, capitalist way; the consumers have ultimately lost. Creative has done jack squat with the A3D technology so far, and has not improved upon the drivers for the Vortex line by Aureal.

    End result: Creative wins, consumers lose.

  • "nVidia has received favorable ruling in its case againt 3dfx" It's just salvo's of PR. Does this mean anything at all? Why even put this down as news?

  • That's exactly what fuels competition; however, I think that the video card companies are starting to incorrectly assume that patent infringement lawsuits can be used as a competitive tactic: if you can't beat them, sue them!
  • Of course you're going to see a big difference when you compare four year old tech (the V2) to todays best (the GF2).

    While you're at it, why don't you compare a 900 mhz Athalon to a Pentium Pro.
  • > Making Incredible Profits from MisAplied Patents, perhaps

    Hehe. Nice try. Funny, but no.

    Here's a short summary.

    Mipmap comes from latin: "multum in parvo" meaning many things in a small place.

    Since a picture is worth a thousand words, just look at the pictures here:
    Gamasutra article on mipmapping [gamasutra.com], and Mipmapping pictures and theory [home.net]

    I won't discuss Isotropic or Anisotropic [sgi.com] texture filtering, since the pictures can convey the concept clearer then my mangled descriptions. :-)

    Although I will leave with:
    - Tri-linear filtering is bilinear filtering (2x2 texels) applied between 2 mipmaps.
    - You will also (rarely) see the term 'ripmaps' which I beleive the RGB components are stored seperately (instead of interleaved.)

    Hope that helps.
  • "As for the NVidia drivers, aren't you in the least bit intrigued that I found out how they optimized the performance without looking through the DRI to ruin the surprise?"

    Not sure I follow you...

    I have no doubt that nVidia is constantly optimizing their drivers. However, as a consumer in the video card market, I like to know how the drivers are being optimized. I like to be able to look at the source and determine what they're doing to get their speed gains. I like to be sure that if the company decides to abandon linux support, the source code is still available for anyone to download and start working on. I like that if something goes wrong (as happened with a TNT2 of mine under linux) I have immediate access to a bug monitoring system, and a mailing list full of developers.

    That is what I consider to be good linux support. Not this close sourced junk that nVidia is putting out.

    Ranessin
  • the VSA 100 is pretty scaleable.
    I've seen a sheet with all kind of worksations with the VSA 100 chip.
    I think the workstation with the most chips had 32
    and as far as I know, its possible to put in up to 128 chips =)

  • Not only is this "news" just a 3dfx press release, the /. headline has half its details completely backwards.

    3dfx claims to have received a favorable ruling the the lawsuit they filed against NVIDIA, not in the "salvo" they received from NVIDIA. There is no "retaliation" involved.

    (Insert obligatory comments on the rate at which /. is going to hell here.)

  • Which lawsuit is 3Dfx getting the favorable rulings on?

    The Slashdot post seems to say it's the one NVidia brought against 3Dfx, covering several patents including one that seems to be for hardware 3D acceleration itself (at least, that's how the patent looked when I read it). Rather ridiculous patents, at any rate. But the MSNBC one seems to be talking about the one 3Dfx brought against NVidia, covering several equally ridiculous patents like multitexturing.

    So which one is it?
    ----------
  • Yep, the good old quantity/quality question again. Why don't we bring judging videocards down to a very simple question.

    (Pleasure minus annoyance)/price= judgment. And yes, the fact that you need an external power supply can be counted under annoyance...
  • It may not be news, but it's a little patch of calm on slashdot, situated between the two flamefests that are US-politics articles. Just look around you: there's practically no one here. It's like reading the stories in the special-topics forums on the left column of the front page that don't make it to the front page itself, which I encourage all sincere and intelligent readers to do.

    And don't forget, and it's still news that the courts have reached these rulings. This may be a lame article in itself, but it's a vehicle for intelligent discussion on an important subject.
  • This is on the lawsuit filed 2 years ago by 3dfx against Nvidia on multi-texturing technology.

    It sounds one-sided in favor of 3dfx because the ruling was one-sided in favor of 3dfx; the judge chose to use 3dfx's definitions of what the patent means and none of Nvidia's definitions.

    3dfx is basically two steps away from getting a favorable judgment from the courts, and they're mostly formalities; at this stage, Nvidia's best recourse is to delay like crazy and hope that 3dfx goes out of business before they can make their claims, which, at the rate things are going, is likely.

    Before y'all jump on the whole "Oh, this is an obvious technology, why does this have to be settled in a courtroom instead of the market," etc., remember that 3dfx spent and risked millions of R&D money developing their multi-texturing technology, and that a big reason Nvidia has leapfrogged 3dfx technologically was because Nvidia didn't have to research it; it had already been created by 3dfx. But that's why intellectual property protection exists in the first place -- so that if you come up with an idea and spend millions developing it, your competitors don't get the advantage by stealing it!

  • This document may contain forward-looking statements that are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties. The words "estimate," "project," "intend," "expect," "believe," "desire," "could" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.

    Perhaps this "could" be nothing more than a press release from 3dfx, "intended" to keep money from wandering towards what I "believe" is a superior product-maker.

    Then again, I "could" be wrong.

  • OT

    3D is great. Really. Though, I don't normally use 3D to play games (after hours only... and not so much on the PC but on the consoles instead).

    I work with both 3D and 2D design... mostly 2D. But when I work in 3D, it's a program layed out just like any other program while the 3D rendering takes place on your canvas.

    At home, I didn't bother to shell out for a Wildcat (crazy?), Oxygen, or even a Geforce (been said it competes with the Oxygen in performance with Softimage). But, I stick with my Matrox. Why?

    It's the 2D performance that I'm looking at! I did have a chance to work with Nvidia cards or even 3dfx cards, but the 2D is not as good as Matrox. And if you throw in a flat screen (not LCD, CRT flats) monitor, damn, you can never go back! At least I can't!

    Though, it would be nice if Matrox finally made a 3D accellerator that could perform even as well as the original Geforce... or better yet! Have the leading 3D card developers make better RAMDACs! Or even to the more extreme. Give me 2 AGP slots!

    Okay, I'll stop now :)


    --
    Neafevoc

  • ...more like pathetic. The drivers for my Voodoo 2 were awful. GLQuake worked fine, but in Quake2, there were rainbow-colored light bursts every time the shotgun was fired. Furthermore, the rendering speed was MUCH slower than with the Windows drivers.

    One big reason for NVidia's great performance is how they're constantly optimizing the drivers. For example, the performance gain in the Detonator 3 was primarily due to the faster rendering of sprites. Even in ultra-high sprite count scenes (gibbing 3 bodies in Quake3 with the railgun, for instance), the framerate drop is insignificant (compared to the more than 50% framerate drop in this situation with other cards). 3dfx is more concerned with squeezing all they can out of their scarce profits than they are with improving their products. FSAA is nice when you're rasterizing 3D scenes for videos, but it is otherwise useless when compared with the faster framerate and image quality of NVidia's cards.

  • Thats not the issue.
  • It would probably help the consumer more. Just think of it: GeForce framerates with V5 FSAA. Now THAT's a dream card!
  • NVIDIA did not have 3dfx's patent to work with you know... so how exactly were they able to use 3dfx's research?
  • The end of a technology company is near when they start paying mreo mney to lawyers then they do to engineers.

    Something to think about, in general.
  • Standard boilerplate generally used by any company after they've been sued over a press release, or after their stock takes a dive.
  • This is what it's to me:

    There's been no stealing except from every capable individual who could easily out class these companies were it not for the lawyer tax.
    Patenting simple devices makes it illegal for me TO WORK!

    I'm sick and tired of it.
  • As always is the case, these same "patents" and some other features infringe on work done by a long list of companies that predate the existence of 3dfx including work by the same individuals while at SGI and other companies. GC
  • put a Microsoft Freedom to Innovate newsletter as a Slashdot news article...

  • Both mipmaps and ripmaps are used to counter aliasing artifacts in texture mapping. The mipmap contains all the filtered images that are 1/4 size of the original (decimate by 2 in x and y recursively) and the ripmap contains all the combinations obtained by halving the height or width of the bitmap (decimate by 2 in x or y recursively). Needless to say the ripmap produces a better result visually at the expense of some extra memory.

  • Damn, theys gots points to burn. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Too bad you can't get a "First Mod"

  • PR release as News (Score:3)

    by Thanatos ( 15980 ) on Monday October 16, 2000 @06:06AM (#702139)
    why is a 3dfx PR release being treated as news? it's so 1-sided I'm almost nauseous.
  • evidently, 3dfx is a holds patents on 'mipmap dithering' technologies...

    could it be Making Incredible Profits from MisAplied Patents, perhaps?
  • I'm sorry, but this whole patent infringement thing is a load of manure! The Glide standard is fading out in favor of D3D and OGL. 3Dfx was recently accepted into the board which is improving OGL standards. If that isn't a sign of 3Dfx caving, I don't know what is.

    There is a distinct difference between 3Dfx's architecture and nVidia's architecture. 3Dfx is now using anywhere between 2 and I think 6 VSA100 chips and the highest ones require an external power supply. nVida's current gForce series of chips use only one chip, and doesn't have any extra power needs other than what the mobo can supply. I have to admit that I am looking into a V4 for my new computer, so I don't think that I am biased in any direction.

  • Yeah, but those were the video systems in my two computers. Sure, it's comparing today's best to the best of two years ago, but then it gives you a basic idea of what to expect. Furthermore, I have access to only those two, so those are the only readings which I trust. If anyone has a high-sprite report on a V5, I'd like to hear it.
  • It seems to be sticking spaces in the A HREF tags. Bender, of course, is the next Slashdot source code.
  • Both companies are overly belligerant and hysterical about "intellectual property". Gimme Matrox any day, with a kick-ass CPU and 2-year-old games and I'll be happy.

  • I'm glad you said this, so I don't have to myself. This is a self-glorifyimng 3dfx press release. Hell, it even has company info and disclaimers.

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