I am hoping for some legal insight on Nvidia

[Kyle Manel]

Hello there,

 

I am quite sure that many/most of us here have a love/hate relationship with Nvidia; We love their product, but hate their prices/influence/monopoly.

 

I am curious though, because it appears to me that the amount of influence Nvidia has on its market is precisely why monopoly law exists, and I am curious what your (legal professionals) perspective is on this.

I ask because Nvidia influence its market in aparently beneficial ways, though this could easily become destructive to any of their present markets with shifts in availability and/or cost... and it seems to me that this quantifiable control that Nvidia, doesn't necessarily, exert is why this laws exist, and I am confused why they cannot be actioned against Nvidia, because they are a legitimate monopoly in Graphics technology, which makes it far more valuable to them AND us, for them to be influencing growth in their market and facilitating growth of competition, not curbing/purchasing it instead.

 

While I certainly do welcome discussion, my purpose is to glean a legal description of why the graphics market is operating as it should be, or if it isn't why no one has actioned this issue.  And if time provides, perhaps a legal recognition of why these laws (monopoly) are productive and valuable to stem monopolization.

[Grabhanem]

I don't think Nvidia really has enough market influence to be considered a monopoly. AMD has very competitive cards at the majority of price points (basically all of them if the 6800XT launch can be believed) and aside from RTX, which isn't required to run any games and is soon to have competition, there's nothing forcing anyone to buy an Nvidia card.

[IkeaGnome]

3 minutes ago, Kyle Manel said:

Hello there,

 

I am quite sure that many/most of us here have a love/hate relationship with Nvidia; We love their product, but hate their prices/influence/monopoly.

 

I am curious though, because it appears to me that the amount of influence Nvidia has on its market is precisely why monopoly law exists, and I am curious what your (legal professionals) perspective is on this.

I ask because Nvidia influence its market in aparently beneficial ways, though this could easily become destructive to any of their present markets with shifts in availability and/or cost... and it seems to me that this quantifiable control that Nvidia, doesn't necessarily, exert is why this laws exist, and I am confused why they cannot be actioned against Nvidia, because they are a legitimate monopoly in Graphics technology, which makes it far more valuable to them AND us, for them to be influencing growth in their market and facilitating growth of competition, not curbing/purchasing it instead.

 

While I certainly do welcome discussion, my purpose is to glean a legal description of why the graphics market is operating as it should be, or if it isn't why no one has actioned this issue.  And if time provides, perhaps a legal recognition of why these laws (monopoly) are productive and valuable to stem monopolization.

Probably has to do with them not being a monopoly. That's like saying Samsung or Apple has a monopoly.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Fasauceome]

5 minutes ago, Kyle Manel said:

I am curious what your (legal professionals) perspective is on this.

I don't think we have any of those here

[ProjectBox153]

I'm not a legal professional, but I certainly wouldn't call Nvidia a monopoly. They have competition, most notably from AMD. Nvidia isn't the only source of graphics cards.

[bmx6454]

if they buy up amd, then they would be a monopoly. while them shorting the supply of their cards whether intentional or not, has nothing to do with being a monopoly, its just annoying. just my opinion, not a legal expert.

[Tanaz]

Many people and tech reviewers in particular have praised the hell out of Ampere, dare I say embarrasingly so. Realistically the new Nvidia architecture is one of it's least efficient and least improved ones yet. The power consumption of the new cards is linear to their performance improvement which points to no architectural generational improvement whatsoever. People keep drawing false comparisons between the 3080 and 2080Ti which was insanely ovepriced and leave the 3090 completely out of the question because it is " a Titan level card" . No, it is not a Titan card - hence it doesn't have a Titan driver and it can't do what a Titan card can. It is the flagship to which the 2080 Ti should be compared to but people somehow keep making the wrong conclusions because they just compare the wrong products.

 

While this weird rant might seem slightly off topic it's just a way for me to say that the "Nvidia monopoly" is almost entirely user driven. Nvidia somehow has become the Apple of GPUs. They can  do no wrong. Reality is much much different. Those cards operate at their absolute limit which is clear  by the crashing and stability issues and the almost 0 headroom for overclock. There is no "huge leap" in performance. The last 2 generations of cards equate to 1 generation worth of performance uplift.

 

If we look at AMD GPUs they shot themselves in the foot with the 5700 and 5700xt because of bad drivers on release  but those GPUs are perfectly competitive with Nvidia's 2070S and even 2080. And now that AMD have shown RDNA2 it's also clear that they'll be in the fight at the absolute high end as well. They might lose by 5-10% but their power consumption and their PRICE more than makes up for it. The monopoly is largely user driven and unfortunately Nvidia's cheap marketing tricks seem to have worked this time around better than ever.

 

[Ankerson]

NVIDIA is not a monopoly, it doesn't meet that criteria in the 1st place.

 

 

[TempestCatto]

28 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

I don't think we have any of those here

Nah, we've got a few YouTube University, school of law and order, grads in here somewhere.

[IkeaGnome]

15 minutes ago, Tanaz said:

If we look at AMD GPUs they shot themselves in the foot with the 5700 and 5700xt because of bad drivers on release  but those GPUs are perfectly competitive with Nvidia's 2070S and even 2080. And now that AMD have shown RDNA2 it's also clear that they'll be in the fight at the absolute high end as well. They might lose by 5-10% but their power consumption and their PRICE more than makes up for it. The monopoly is largely user driven and unfortunately Nvidia's cheap marketing tricks seem to have worked this time around better than ever.

Not to derail, as it leads into Intel and AMD. I'm curious to see what will happen to Intel with all this. I think in an indirect way they're caught in the crossfire. More so with people looking at CPUs also. If Zen 3+6800XT+MoBo is somewhat close to price of a 3090, what's to stop people from going to one brand to keep things simple? I think as long as AMD has a decent launch and drivers, both Nvidia and indirectly Intel will have a run for their money.

[Ankerson]

35 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

if they buy up amd, then they would be a monopoly. while them shorting the supply of their cards whether intentional or not, has nothing to do with being a monopoly, its just annoying. just my opinion, not a legal expert.

 

They would have to buy AMD and Intel to have no competition in the market at all. 

[MadPistol]

Nvidia's influence is created because they are the major trend setter in the industry. The reason? They pour billions of dollars into R&D for new tech. They were the first company to introduce the pixel shaders, a unified-shader architecture, GPU-based compute, Real-time Ray Tracing, AI-based rendering, and I'm sure a ton more tech that I cannot remember. None of this happened for free, and once they released it, the rest of the industry scrambled to catch up.

 

As others have pointed out, AMD's RX 6000 cards seem like they're going to be super competitive with RTX 3000 GPUs, so AMD may have well and truly (finally) caught up with them on a tech front. Because of this, the monopoly argument falls flat as Nvidia has very real competition from AMD.

Also, if you go by the numbers alone, Intel has the most "GPUs" on the market, and Nvidia would be very quick to point this out if a lawsuit on this item was brought against them.