Nvidia Settles GPU Price-Fixing Antitrust Case 105
arcticstoat writes to report that Nvidia has offered up a settlement for the GPU price-fixing case. As a part of the settlement Nvidia would be required to pay $850,000 into a fund projected to hit $1.7 million (supposedly AMD/ATI would make up the other half). The antitrust case indicated that Nvidia and ATI worked together in order to 'fix, raise, maintain, and stabilize prices of GPUs sold in the US.'"
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Gamers are phags. Chew on that, bitches!
As a heterosexual non-gamer who is on Slashdot anonymously calling people names on a Friday, you can pump your fist in victory!
chise1 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:chise1 (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they should have to refund money back to the customers. Back when the Record Companies were accused of CD price-fixing, that was the punishment they received. My family only got $44 ($22 for me and $22 for my mother), but that's still better than giving it to the politicians where it can be misappropriated on nonsense (like studying butterfly sex).
Paypal received a similar punishment (I got $54 that time), albeit for different reasons.
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Specifically decline to be a part of the reward. Sue them in small claims court for the cost of it. Don't BS about damages or whine about your tear etched joystick. ;)
You are doing it wrong (Score:1)
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I was not even aware that Nvidia sold cards. Anywhere. It was my understanding that they only sell the chipsets, and other manufacturers put them into cards. I also didn't know that either Nvidia or ATI sold cards on their websites.
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ATI does indeed sell ATI branded video cards on their website, or at least they used to before AMD bought them. But you're right about Nvidia, they don't sell cards, just the GPU.
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they only sell the chipsets, and other manufacturers put them into cards.
Nowadays, they sell the chips and the reference design (e.g. that's why most cards look more or less the same). Haven't seen their own branded cards here (Netherlands) for a long time.
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I bought an ATI card for my mac back in the day.. Way too expensive, but only option..
Now how to I get my check?!
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Incorrect!
NVidia only sells the chips and reference designs.
This applies to anyone buying the GPUs, regardless of who made the board or who dumped the BIOS and stickers on it.
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Who in the hell will still have the receipt for cards they bought SIX years ago?
Small businesses are required to keep receipts for business expenses (like computer equipment) for six years. At least, that's the requirement here -- I'd imagine it's the same or very similar everywhere.
Fine, now go after the petroleum companies, (Score:4, Insightful)
The at least once daily "survey" every corporate gas station in the US has to do everyday can't be passed off as anything but price fixing / a trust. As far as I'm concerned they're screwing consumers a lot worse than a couple of GPU manufacturers.
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not a joke at all. Rockefeller made his Billion dollars doing exactly what Microsoft does by buying one gas station and using profits from others to sell gas at far below market cost until the other stations sold or failed. Microsoft's tactics of bundling software are harder to prove as "below cost" so they get away with it. The Standard Oil break up was several times larger (in real economic units) than Microsoft at it's peak.
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That would be awesome, because in the wake of the extinction of the Detroit Dino's and the Japanese extortion will come the new generations of American cars sprouting up from the ashes that will put Toyota and Honda to shame, assuming the gubmint allows them companies to happen. There are several small / lesser known US auto makers with some damned cool cars that I would like to see take off. Most of them only make specialty/super cars, but if there were no dino competition the may change their market a b
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I'm about to leave for a few hours, so before I hear "What other manufacturers", look up Panoz and Vector. Not well known, and not in the current consumer price range, but they could possibly step up to the plate if needed.
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Seeing how the dollar is going it's probably going to cost that much to buy a car in the future anyway.
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Can you provide details/sources? I've never heard of this, but it certainly sounds interesting.
Re:Fine, now go after the petroleum companies, (Score:4, Informative)
I've worked around retail petroleum extensively in the past, most US based and with the exception of one really well known.
Each morning (sometimes more often) any store that is corporate owned or corporate contracted (i.e. anything that isn't Lou's gas and grub that doesn't show a logo) sends their manager/accountant person around to certain gas stations. This manager has to write down the prices of the other gas stations, this includes others with the same logo as the managers own but more importantly those that don't have it. They then send these prices into the corporate offices. The prices are then determined for the submitting store based on the prices around that store. Sometimes it's just a computerized "here it is" sometimes there's some more thought to it, based on how much do we want to raise/lower all the prices a whole? If prices were truly supply and demand there would be no survey, there would simply be "I'm easily selling lots of gas, lets charge more" vs. "I'm not selling much gas, lets charge less".
This is more of a legal loophole. Instead of Shell, Chevron, and Exxon agreeing to keep prices at a certain level in some back room meeting, which is illegal, they agree to do surveys and stay within an unwritten tolerance level of one another.
Lou's Gas and Grub isn't immune either. See, he buys his gas from the big companies, he isn't necessarily contracted to just one of them, but they sale their gas based on the current market price. They can send one guy out to deliver gas on a highway on 100 mile stretch in one day, he can charge the last guy on the trip $0.50 a gallon more than he charged the first guy if the market is that varied 100 miles away.
It's not as efficient or steadfast as a back room deal, but it's sufficient.
Re:Fine, now go after the petroleum companies, (Score:4, Insightful)
You must not understand business. See, if my competitors are charging $8 a gallon and I know my gas costs me $0.80 a gallon, I'm not going to go "gee, I should charge my cost + 50% so I'll just charge $1.20". I'm going to go "shit, this asshole's charging $8 a gallon, I can charge $7.50 a gallon and make a killing". Only an idiot only looks at his prices and then sets the price based on some predetermined margin.
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but what happens when you run out of gas to sell? then you have to go to the good'ole boys and buy some gas. But they won't sell it to you at a 'fair' price because you've been undercutting their friends.
If the distributors collude, you lose.
It happened in the diamond industry. Which is why de-beers can't operate directly on US soil. Or they would be sued under anti-trust laws. While diamonds and gasoline are completely different, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.
Even ram companies got busted just
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I wasn't aware that DeBeers didn't operate in the US. I figured they were ok with paying the monopoly fines, because they more than made up the cost in sales of their over priced carbon.
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I did read that 2 years ago when I proposed and was researching diamonds...but wikipedia says you are right.
I swore it was here: http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/prologue.htm [edwardjayepstein.com]
but I didn't see it and don't have time to read the whole thing right now.
"Industrial diamonds - In 2004 De Beers pleaded guilty and paid a $10 million fine to the United States Department of Justice to settle a 1994 charge that De Beers had conspired with General Electric to fix the price of industrial diamonds.[24][25]" - wikip
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It's not difficult to stop them, even if you want a diamond. Either buy a used a diamond, something that DeBeers has convinced women not to do over the past century. The other option is to get a synthetic diamond. There are a few companies which make gemstone quality synthetic diamonds. DeBeers has been trying to come up with all sorts of methods for distinguishing one of these synthetics for a natural diamond, but as far as I know, they haven't found a way yet, because these synthetics ARE real diamond
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it's worse where i live. they actually have a state law mandating that gas stations aren't allowed to sell gas at a loss, and they have the same law for retail stores. now this sounds like protection for mom and pop stores, but only small towns below 4000 people have 'mom and pop' gas stations, and right now we're 50 cents a gallon more than the state next to us.
the reason the law doesn't work? well the rest of the country doesn't have loss leader laws, so all the big distribution systems are all regional
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the collusion on the price of gasoline is the minor issue, the collusion on the price of a barrel of oil is absolutely crazy, and is causing riots in countries that can't afford the price of oil and still put food on the table.
for most of the history major governments have leaned heavily on oil suppliers to keep a low, affordable price, there are all kinds of laws about this all over the world, but all of a sudden, since USA invaded iraq, one of the worst offenders for breaking opec rules, causing iran to a
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The reason they were caught was because it was too much of a c
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The at least once daily "survey" every corporate gas station in the US has to do everyday can't be passed off as anything but price fixing / a trust.
That's not ever going to happen. Composite government funds (investment funds and otherwise) own a majority stake in Exxon and probably most other publicly traded oil companies. The state of New York [cafr1.com] had 24.8 million shares of Exxon in 2006.
Could it be that our own Government over the last several decades has been promoting to those fortune 500 companies, of which Government owns most through Bond - Loan investment / stock ownership [EXAMPLES: 82% stock ownership of Microsoft Corporation, Disney 61%, AOL - Time Warner 58%, EXXON 72%] to manufacture abroad so that Government would realize greater returns on their investments at the Peoples of the USA's expense in jobs and wealth retention.
http://cafr1.com/ [cafr1.com]
It should be pretty obvious why most corporations are allowed to run roughshod over the American people. If they properly investigated these companies it would cut into their bottom line. Welcome to the Corporation of the United States of America!
Just g
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You don't understand the system.
If the local grocer notices that a competitor has apples for sale for $.20 less than they do, what's to prevent them from lowering prices to match? Likewise if the price is $.20 higher -- why not raise yours, perhaps only $.10, and make a little more profit?
If you have apples already purchased and on the shelves, and your supplier suddenly raises prices $.50, do you keep selling the apples you have at the old, cheaper price, or do you eat the price difference and hope that y
Wait. What? (Score:3, Interesting)
...anyone who bought a graphics card directly from Nvidia or ATI's website in the US ...
How is that going to help the rest of the affected customers?
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The rest of the affected customers bought cards from manufacturers that simply use nvidia/ati chips. You can't sue nvidia/ati for what those manufacturers charged for their cards... unless you claim that they forced them to sell at increased prices, but that'd be a different lawsuit altogether.
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I just checked nvidia's shop, and I see no products direct from nvidia. They are all third-party cards sold by third-party vendors.
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Yay more Useless Class Action (Score:5, Insightful)
I say it is useless because the regular blokes who bought the over-priced graphics cards won't see jack squat from this. As is the case with every class action i've ever seen, what ends up happening is whichever litigation-happy person initiated it gets a large settlement (as do their lawyers) and everyone else gets $5 coupons for cracker jacks.
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As long as the company gets punished, I usually don't care to whom the money goes. But in this case the dollar amount does not seem large enough to justify apathy, so I agree with you in this particular case but not in general.
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Mass Tort is a scam. Lawyers use every tactic in the book to bring in clients, get a settlement and then scoop out 40% for themselves. Both the company and the consumer loses and the lawyer gets a jet.
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Drop in the bucket (Score:3, Informative)
Nividia posted sales of USD 892.7 million. [gamesindustry.biz]
So they offer to settle for $850 thousand?
0.1% of their sales???
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Nividia posted sales of USD 892.7 million. [gamesindustry.biz]
So they offer to settle for $850 thousand?
0.1% of their sales???
... which in AMD's case would probably be 100% of their net profits.
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that's mainly because of a glut of buggy worthless quad core processors that don't end in '50s' and having trouble getting their dies shrunk. intel is down to 45nm and amd just finally got 65nm parts working right!
but with benchmark makers rigging their tests who can tell if intel are really faster than amd. " A VIA Nano CPU has had its CPUID changed from the original VIA to fake GenuineAMD and GenuineIntel. An improvement of, respectively, 10% and 47% of the score was seen" http://hardware.slashdot.org/ar [slashdot.org]
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Nividia posted sales of USD 892.7 million.
So they offer to settle for $850 thousand?
0.1% of their sales???
Were all of their sales a result of price fixing? The article says it's about stuff ordered from their site between certain dates.
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I'd say that says pretty loud and clear that there wasn't much of a case here, and they paid some symbolic sum to make it go away instead of wasting the time and money on lawyers to fight it. Whoever agreed to it must've thought the same, otherwise they'd never agree to such a small settlement.
Not Proven Innocent?? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "However, it's interesting that neither company has been proved innocent in this case, with the claims being dismissed out of court instead."
Silly me. I thought you had to be proven guilty, at least in the USA. Is the reporter that dumb or is he trying to put a slant on this?
Frankly, it sounds to me like there's no case to answer, and this is just a quick way to make it go away. If there had been any sort of case the settlement costs would have been in the $100+ million range, not $112,000 to the plaintiffs and $1.7 million for the class (which I presume will mostly go to the lawyers).
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For a civil case, the 2 parties can settle without a ruling from the judge.
At this point that is the only way that the RIAA has had any success.
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in this case, the price of the lawyers was $1.7 million for writing a letter, and getting a court date.
not bad for what 4 billable hours? in this economy who can beat getting paid $425,000 an hour?
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.
In a civil case "guilt" or "innocence" has no meaning. The issues are defined simply in terms of personal and financial responsibility under the law - and a case ends in a "finding" for the plaintiff or the defendant based on the weight of the evidence.
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Silly me. I thought you had to be proven guilty, at least in the USA.
Only in a criminal court!
Afaict civil courts can punish people/companies based on merely it being marginally more likely that they were in the wrong than in the right.
Did I miss something? (Score:2, Insightful)
I must've missed something. Nvidia and ATI GPUs are excellent counterparts, the two most powerful cards available, and if prices are high, it's because nobody else can create a card for less.
Honestly though, I can buy an amazing video card for less than 100 bucks. I can't buy an equivilent video card from Matrox, S3, Via, or Intel at all, let alone for 100 bucks. How are they fixing prices?
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A while back the NVIDIA president emailed ATI and said that they should get together some time to set prices for video cards.
That's, you know, illegal and stuff.
Generally speaking, if businessmen are going to do something like that they just meet in person so there's no paper trail. Oil companies been doing it this way for years, and I know the owners of some of the local businesses meet together to arrange "things".
I'm surprised that they got off so lightly. But then again, Microsoft got away from their an
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>>The only mentions of price were about STOCK prices.
Huh, they have OEM stock prices now?
Lol.
(See the reference to the other poster below.)
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Would you like to provide a reference for this remark?
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A scan of one email:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/0/G/156832/original/Picture%203.png [bestofmicro.com]
Taken from:
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/amd-nvidia-price-fixing,0201--4553----jpg-.html [tomshardware.com]
Best line from the bunch: "We need to stop beating each other up in the OEM space".
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:4, Informative)
For a period of time Nvidia and ATI agreed to boost the market value of GPU's by arranging for similarly powered products to be sold at the same price.
The following PDF document describes the entire case: GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS [regmedia.co.uk]
ANTITRUST LITIGATION
Copies of the E-mails are here E-mail evidence of price fixing [tomshardware.com]
Both of us have spent the last three years trying to bring the perceived value of our products up to the level of Intel. The "GPU" category is clean and has served us well that way. We both have increased the price of our high end product several fold over the last 4 years while Intel's high end prices have more than halved. Creating another category serves to work contradictory to that. How does one cleanly position it versus a GPU and a CPU?? It will tear down what we have both built.
There are now at least 51 different anti-trust lawsuits in the pipeline [infopackets.com]
The usual punishment will be a large fine - maybe a donation to charity - donating money to a charity allowing poor families to buy GPU pc's for Christmas or education.
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From those emails, it seems to me like they discussed using the name GPU to build the market together, there were no discussions about pricing. And, from the emails, ATI guys were saying that they wanted to use the name VPU, instead. I don't see anything particular damning in there. The ATI response to your quote above was something along the lines of "we thought R300 is more than just a graphics chip, so we wanted to go with VPU to distinguish it", it wasn't "yeah, you're right, let's price fix".
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On page 14 of the PDF document there is a graph showing the variation in pricing between graphics boards of equivalent performance.
Between the time the Geforce FX 5800 ($399 5/2003) / Radeon 9800 ($399 5/5/2003) came out and the
time the GeForce 7900 GS ($200 9/6/2006 ) / Radion X1650 Pro ($199 9/15/2006), there was less than $1 variation in prices. At the same time, the variation in release dates was also substantially lower than outside this period of time.
Price drops (Score:4, Informative)
With such rapid price drops on graphics cards I thought competition between ATI and Nvidia was working. Why, I just bought a 9600GSO for $34 after rebate and live cashback (and free shpping - Newegg rocks!)
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thanks, newegg is fresh out of those. if you had said 'online' i probably could have inferred newegg, and gotten one myself! if only you had obfuscated your source!
sooo... (Score:2)
What does this mean for the customers that bought the products at the higher than they should have been prices? (ie. me. 8800gts g92) Do we get a refund or anything or do we get the shaft as always?
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shaft
So... (Score:1)
Now unless 3dfx was in on this deal eight years ago, before Nvidia had even bought them out, we
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?
High end cards typically debut at $600 now.
More if you want the one with the water block / bullshit.
You'll pay even more at "launch" when 4 random online shops get in on the first batch of 7 cards.
$300 is mid-range now. $300 becomes high end a few months after decent quantities of cards hit the market, and the rebates start rolling in.
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048+1069633099&Configurator=&Subcategory=48&description=&Ntk=&SpeTabStoreType=&Order=PRICED&srchInDesc= [newegg.com]
As you can see, the first cards to hit around $~300 are the GTX 260s. The GTX 280s are high end. The 260 is a peg below it.
If you don't know Nvidia, all you need to know is for the past 4 generations is this:
8 = flagship.
x9xx > x8xx >> x6xx >> x5xx > x4xx >> x6xx > x0xx
Ultra >
Wow. (Score:2)
Billions (Score:2)
Yea (Score:2)
gimme my money! (Score:2)
I've bought plenty of GPUs from nVidia. I've paid a small fortune for them too.
I want my cut.
I believe it... (Score:2)
... it seems since the advent of 3D cards they've held roughly at around $300-500, I remember paying $400 for a brand new voodoo/voodoo2 card when they first came out, it seems a little strange that prices have been eeking ever higher or have held all this time.