NVidia Seeks 3dfx Injunction

Marcus writes "Saw on Shugashack that NVidia has just filed a lawsuit against 3dfx seeking an injunction to stop all 3dfx Voodoo3/4/5 boards from shipping. NVidia's statement was 'This innovation is achieved through the annual investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development. We cannot allow the fruits of this investment to be misappropriated.'"

this may well be the fewest posts ever

[colmore]

bleh

IANAHE

[kindbud]

(I Am Not A Hardware Engineer) But one of the patents (first one listed in the Shugasite article) seems to me to be for memory-mapped I/O. I think there was plenty of prior art...

Re:Nobody has replied to this?

[talonyx]

Well, that's great. You go play the maybe 25 3d accelllerated games for linux, while I have access to over 500 games on my super compatible card. Awesome GL, Awesome D3D.

My TNT2 is nice and fast. And it works well. Do you have an nvidia card? No? Are you jealous, maybe?
Radeon is not as fast as Geforce2 Ultra. Plus, as is usual with ATI, 3d image quality is bad.
Hahaha, the NV25 inside of the Xbox will kick the crap out of Gamecube - not to mention the fact that most PC games will run on Xbox with a simple recompile... no porting.

Enjoy.

Re:IANAHE

[kindbud]

In any event, there seems to be plenty of prior art, since NVIDIA named the Voodoo3 in the suit, which has a two year old chipset. If they held the patents before two years ago, why did they not sue when the Voodoo3 appeared?

Nobody has replied to this?

[talonyx]

Weird. Nobody cares about this?
Well, they can and should sue. They have a patent, after all. It IS illegal to infringe on a patent, right?

Though about the ethics of this, it's just Nvidia trying to get a monopoly. Seeing as how Geforce2ultra is like 50 times faster than Voodoo5 6000 or whatever, no problem.

Not another one!

[batobin]

Just what we need! Another copyright infringement lawsuit in the technology market. If I wasn't a nerd, I'd get sick of this crap.

My question is, would nVidia have done this if 3dfx wasn't such a prominent graphics card company? I looked at the copyrights in question, and I wondered to myself if ATI was breaking any of these in addition to 3dfx. Just something to think about.

Re:IANAHE

[Trojan]

Probably marketing tactics... :)

I just read over some old tomshardware stories and found a section about 3dfx sueing nvidia over patent infringement :). In the end the companies will agree to cross license some patents and all will be peace.

Patent office will be our doom

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked up the various patents. Each covered some relatively obvious technique for transfering data to an I/O device. Each is something that any I/O device maker would consider implementing. There are likely to be dozens of companies that violate these patents, but NVidia is of course only going after their weaker competitor (at present).

If you ask me, I think our current patent system is stifling innovation, not protecting it. With every niggly obvious idea being patented, it is literally impossible to create a product that doesn't violate dozens of patents. Small companies without big patent portfolios to make deals with can only make due by not attracting the attention of the companies whose patents they are violating.

Would things be better if we just tossed away the idea of patents? Probably not, but where does one draw the line between real innovation and the next obvious step?

I'm sure this discussion has been going round and round many times, but it really ticks me off each time I see a new legal case like this. The companies with the bigger legal budgets will prevail, not those with the better products (note: I'm generalizing here, not trying to make statements about 3dfx/NVidia).

Re:It's a hoax

[stew777]

...are you sure? If so a LOT of sites we're fooled.. I've seen this news on a bunch of sites already (mostly game sites liek daily radar, etc..)

Re:Patent office will be our doom

[aetheroar]

Seriously, the way patents are implemented is outdated. Patentees get at least 5 years (or is it 20) to profit from their patent. On the other hand chip speeds double every 18 months, says Moore. Why not make technology patents worth like only 6-12 months of personal profit. 5 years is great if you invent a new plow or sewing machine(such things were the intended targets of the law), but for computer patents obselescence comes too quickly, and the average judge on the bench can't tell an IC from his IV. On another point entirely, aren't they suing away their own lifeblood? Without competition from 3dfx what will keep them to their 6-month design cycle. For that matter, why not just push out chips more slowly and milk the public for profit. We NEED 3dfx to keep nVidia being the good chip people they are. --Use the Batgas!

Re:is this SCSI?

[mordwin]

Re: Amiga Thats knida what I thought, and even that wasn't new. The only stuff I'm not sure about is the virtual/physical address mapping stuff, something the Amiga never had to worry about not having virtual memory (ignoring 3rd party apps). Its not that clear what these patents are about, several of them seem to repeat themselves a lot. Probably just shows what a mess the USPO is in!

Re:IANAHE

[Trojan]

This looks like an improvement... consecutive memory addresses are decoded to the same hardware destination, so that a whole series of commands can be sent in a single burst. With normal memory mapped I/O you would have to write the commands to the same memory address, so burst mode can't be used.
But IANAHE either.