John Carmack CTO of Oculus describes Nvidia's patent suit as "disturbing", shames Nvidia on twitter for promoting it.

[GPUXPert]

The legendary game designer and programmer responsible for creating the first ever first person shooter and the first ever PC LAN games (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D) took his frustrations with Nvidia's patent litigation with Samsung and Qualcomm to twitter shaming the company for promoting it.

"It disturbs me that Nvidia reports on their patent litigation as if we are supposed to be cheering for them."
He stated

 

The entire lawsuit is very controversial once broken, if successful it means that no other company in the world would be allowed to design and sell graphics processors without Nvidia's consent.

Let’s briefly look at the first patent that Nvidia claims has been infringed upon, the GPU, which is short for graphics processing unit. That is any chip that can process graphics and display images on the screen according to Nvidia’s description. What the astute among you will notice here is that this description fits every possible graphics chip sold today in any device whether be it a phone a tablet a game console or a PC. If Samsung or Qualcomm are actively infringing on this patent then so is every single other graphics chip maker. Including ARM, AMD and Intel.

And what can be characterized as “disturbing” in this is that GPUs as described by Nvidia above have actually existed before the company was actually founded in the early nineties. You will notice similar issues with all the other mentioned technologies. Programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing as described by Nvidia are all recognized industry wide definitions for established graphics standards, not proprietary technologies.  Now the method by which Nvidia achieves this functionality is proprietary and that’s what’s actually patentable but not the functionality itself.

 

 

Full story / SOURCE

Edited April 19, 2015 by colonel_mortis
Updated to use twitter embed

[MeDownYou]

Tbh Nvidia has gone nuts. 

 

also, isn't Samsung making more money than Nvidia from like everything from fridges and ssd's to cars?

If so they probably can afford a better lawyer lol

[Keco185]

I almost always agree with Carmack, and this is one of those times. Patent wars have gotten out of hand with this being a prime example. A company should not be able to have a patent on such a fundamental technology to the technological improvement of society such as the GPU. I hope Nvidia loses this case, and maybe we can get larger companies to think twice before suing other companies for patent infringement in what is obviously an anticompetitive move.  This is one of those cases where I hope the larger company, Samsung, wins.

[FakezZ]

Tbh Nvidia has gone nuts. 

 

also, isn't Samsung making more money than Nvidia from like everything from fridges and ssd's to cars?

If so they probably can afford a better lawyer lol

They also make weapons

[Manny Calavera]

Nvidia CEO approved of this crap? Oh wow. This is bonkers.

How they thought they gonna get away with it?

 

 

Maybe we should mass boycott them, see how they like being screwed over.

[Keco185]

Maybe we should mass boycott them, see how they like being screwed over.

Boycotts are great in theory, but Nvidia holds a huge market share on GPUs and getting enough people to boycott buying the GPU they want would be extremely hard. Hopefully the bad PR alone will get them to change their mind; it's an unlikely scenario, but still worth hoping for.

[The Crazed Child]

not buying another Nshitia card again

[Sakkura]

So wait, ATI patented unified shaders in 2005 and was first to market (with the Xbox 360 GPU), and now Nvidia is suing Samsung over "their invention"? Why the heck has this not been thrown out of court immediately?

 

Of course patenting the GPU as a whole is even more ridiculous, but I don't know if anyone else has an earlier patent on that.

[Qwertious]

hmm not sure how this is news tbh. just some famous guy giving his opinions

[Keco185]

hmm not sure how this is news tbh. just some famous guy giving his opinions

 

I feel the news here is more of what Nvidia is doing if anything. Carmack's opinion just validates everyone else's concerns as he's a respected member in the field this is applicable to.

[Qwertious]

I feel the news here is more of what Nvidia is doing if anything. Carmack's opinion just validates everyone else's concerns as he's a respected member in the field this is applicable to.

Well that news has already been posted a while ago... We don't need anymore of a circle jerk of what's wrong and what's right.

[SIGSEGV]

not buying another Nshitia card again

Or just buy them used

[Manny Calavera]

Side track a bit, but Nvidia is also asshole to Linux recently.

 

Maybe after AMD goes bankrupt Nvidia patents gpus. And air.

Evil wins GG

 

 

Boycotts are great in theory, but Nvidia holds a huge market share on GPUs and getting enough people to boycott buying the GPU they want would be extremely hard. Hopefully the bad PR alone will get them to change their mind; it's an unlikely scenario, but still worth hoping for.

Make another 3.5Gb funny video and see it blow up.

[Sakkura]

Side track a bit, but Nvidia is also asshole to Linux recently.

 

As if that's news. Here's what Linus* had to say in 2012:

 

[mr moose]

So wait, ATI patented unified shaders in 2005 and was first to market (with the Xbox 360 GPU), and now Nvidia is suing Samsung over "their invention"? Why the heck has this not been thrown out of court immediately?

 

Of course patenting the GPU as a whole is even more ridiculous, but I don't know if anyone else has an earlier patent on that.

becasue that patent has little to do with their claims. The patents Nvidia allege have been infringed predate AMD shaders and refer to pipeline transfer, lighting and rasterization on a single chip. https://www.google.com/patents/US6198488

 

that's just one, there are 6 other patents:

 

6992667

7038685

7015913

6697063

7209140

6690372

 

I haven't looked them up, but considering they have called for a jury, it's going to take (or at least should take) a while for them to sift through it all to come to a conclusion.

[The Crazed Child]

Or just buy them used

as a matter of fact I bought a used GTX 560 a month ago 

[Sakkura]

becasue that patent has little to do with their claims. The patents Nvidia allege have been infringed predate AMD shaders and refer to pipeline transfer, lighting and rasterization on a single chip. https://www.google.com/patents/US6198488

 

that's just one, there are 6 other patents:

 

6992667

7038685

7015913

6697063

7209140

6690372

 

I haven't looked them up, but considering they have called for a jury, it's going to take (or at least should take) a while for them to sift through it all to come to a conclusion.

 

That is the GPU patent, not the unified shader patent. It's a completely different thing.

 

Nvidia refers to their unified shader developments in sections 18 and 19 of their complaint. They specifically refer to Patent No. 7,038,685 as their patent on unified shaders, and their GeForce 8800 as the world's first GPU with unified shaders and DirectX 10 support. The patent dates to May 2, 2006, and the GeForce 8800 was released in November 2006.

 

The Xbox 360 with ATI's Xenos GPU was released a year earlier, in November 2005. It was first to market with a unified shader architecture. But it didn't support DirectX 10, so I guess Nvidia isn't straight-up lying in their claim. Anyway, ATI's unified shader patent dates to May 24, 2005. Again about a year before Nvidia.

 

I just don't see how they could possibly bash a third party with a patent on something that was patented a year earlier by ATI. It doesn't make any sense. The Geforce 8800 cards were great, a true breakthrough for PC hardware. But that doesn't mean they can claim someone else's invention like this.

[DaRk0]

As if that's news. Here's what Linus* had to say in 2012:

 

-snip-

 

Torvalds gives Nvidia software thumbs up, not middle finger

http://www.cnet.com/news/torvalds-gives-nvidia-software-thumbs-up-not-middle-finger/

 

And this is what he said two years later, so I don't really understand why is everyone circle jerking over this video. It was three years ago, and things have changed. That, and Nvidia still has better drivers for Linux than competition.

[Sakkura]

Torvalds gives Nvidia software thumbs up, not middle finger

http://www.cnet.com/news/torvalds-gives-nvidia-software-thumbs-up-not-middle-finger/

 

And this is what he said two years later, so I don't really understand why is everyone circle jerking over this video. It was three years ago, and things have changed. That, and Nvidia still has better drivers for Linux than competition.

 

I'm not circle-jerking about recent developments, because I don't follow Linux that closely anymore. I was just saying that there's been animosity between the Linux community and Nvidia for a long time, it's not something new. @Manny Calavera was saying Nvidia have been assholes to Linux recently. It may in fact be the other way around, that Nvidia is finally beginning not to be assholes to Linux.

[LAwLz]

I am completely on Carmack's side. I think Nvidia's lawsuit is flat out idiotic and I would love to see them lose. It would have been more fun seeing Carmack's thoughts on why he thinks it is bad though. All the tweet does is say which side he is on, but not why.

[mr moose]

That is the GPU patent, not the unified shader patent. It's a completely different thing.

 

Nvidia refers to their unified shader developments in sections 18 and 19 of their complaint. They specifically refer to Patent No. 7,038,685 as their patent on unified shaders, and their GeForce 8800 as the world's first GPU with unified shaders and DirectX 10 support. The patent dates to May 2, 2006, and the GeForce 8800 was released in November 2006.

 

The Xbox 360 with ATI's Xenos GPU was released a year earlier, in November 2005. It was first to market with a unified shader architecture. But it didn't support DirectX 10, so I guess Nvidia isn't straight-up lying in their claim. Anyway, ATI's unified shader patent dates to May 24, 2005. Again about a year before Nvidia.

 

I just don't see how they could possibly bash a third party with a patent on something that was patented a year earlier by ATI. It doesn't make any sense. The Geforce 8800 cards were great, a true breakthrough for PC hardware. But that doesn't mean they can claim someone else's invention like this.

 

Except that the Nvidia patent actually predates AMD's by 2 years.  Patents start at the filing date, not the publication.

[Sakkura]

Except that the Nvidia patent actually predates AMD's by 2 years.  Patents start at the filing date, not the publication.

 

But it clearly doesn't.

[dlf]

Seems like Nvidia should be broken up into smaller companies . . . .

[Trik'Stari]

Seems like a large majority of corporations everywhere have gone a little insane.

[Noctus]

But it clearly doesn't.

Nvidias filing date of June 30th 03 still predates ati's Nov 20th.