ATI/Nvidia price fixing lawsuit

More at:
http://www.techpowerup.com/65970/AT...the_US_Class_Action_Slapped_Against_them.html

 

Wow..It makes sense though...

 

lol they were really friends all along?!

 

can i get my money back?

 

Hmm, sounds like the average corporate America bs to me .. hopefully we'll see rapid price increases hault in the near future.

 

yes .. its about time someone uncovered these two ..

serves them right

 

With the prices of the most recent GPU hardware, I find it hard to believe that this generation was price fixed.

Sure, considering the prior generations, anyone could see that the prices were ridiculous (650 bucks for an 8800 Ultra). But everyone assumed it was because ATI couldn't keep up and so Nvidia had free reign.

I wish this meant prices for GPUs were going to drop out of the floor, but at current pricing I don't think things could get much cheaper without bankrupting an already hurting AMD/ATI. And Nvidia just took 2 or 3 recent financial hits.

As much as this bothers me (and it doesn't all that much, at least in reference to the AMD 4850), I'd rather AMD/ATI and Nvidia stay in business than crash and burn, leaving us with Intel integrated chipsets.

 

we either need A) More people in the GPU industry (common intel, hurry up already)

Or an unbiased 3rd party that can monitor, and set price ranges and limits.

If you can't produce a better card over time for the same price (or less), then go back to the lab, damnit!

 

Does anyone here know how much it really costs to make a graphics card? Say a GTX280? I would assume the main cost is the R&D. But what type of markup are we talking here?

 

I read somewhere that the graphics-chip, on average, costs 18 dollars. Then you've got memory, semiconductors, the other various peices of metal and plastic. I assume it's not too much more though. I'm going to guess it cost's NV less than 100 bucks to produce a gtx280

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030427185052.html
(from 2003, but its all I could find)

 

but you have to pay for the product development as well.

 

Yeah, but a lot of the more recent chips are just remakes of previous series cards.

 

I'm not saying they weren't price fixing, but be realistic here. I have a feeling that GPUs are a very high overhead buisness. Shipping costs, R&D, stock, skilled labor, advanced sterile facilities... and as to the fact that the latest group is just a die shrink, I would bet that "just a die shrink" means retooling an entire factory. That is not a small cost. I'm guessing almost every moderate to major alteration of the product line involves at least a minor factory retool. And they havea revision what, 2 to 3 times a year? Can you imagine how expensive cars would be if Ford had to shut down and reoutfit thier entire factory every 4-8 months?

I'm not saying that they aren't price fixing, I'm just saying think a little bit here.

 

There are a lot of other companies that face production costs like that. Intel, AMD? If Nvidia can afford to have a price drop like they just did without going under than their prices were too high.

 

Like I said, I'm not saying they aren't guilty, I'm just saying that comments like, "a $600 graphics card only costs $100 to make" are likely...uninformed, to be polite. Statements like that devalue the whole discussion. But as far as Intel and AMD, I would bet that while they have to deal with similar issues, they can spread the cost out at the per unit level more as they likely have a much higher sales volume. And keep in mind that the high end CPU market (consumer level, not even server stuff) is in the realm of 2X or more the price of the priciest GPU.

 

Im sure they have a ton of failed prodcucts when they push the envelope with cards like the 260, too much cramed on that PCB.. Also they pay pretty high wages to people to test the cards, then they have to pay for advertisement/marketing, shipping, ect ect. There are a ton of overheads.

I do half the accounting for the hotel I work at and you think wow 130$ a night what a rip off, but after all the overhead we make like 40$ on a room.

Electricity, free breakfast, water, house keeping, front desk agents on duty, ect are just the common things you think about maybe. But how about the billboard outside that cost like 1600$ a month, or Lodging taxes, AAA fee's, Hilton Honors Fee's, ect.

Im sure a video card company has a good long list of factors that add cost to a product that you wouldnt know off hand also.

On a side note I did a google search for something a couple of weeks ago, and I dunno how but I found the annual financial growth chart for nvidia it was coming right from the nvidia.com page and it got indexed by google somehow and the numbers I saw on there were OMG big, I thought about posting it but thought it may cause a issue if it was not something I should have seen/found.

 

Vicious, you probably just saw part of thier public financial records. I'm pretty sure they are a publicly traded company, which means they have to report to investors.

 

It was an annual earning statement I cant seem to find it again. It was crazy... so many digits.

I can find stock information but not that pdf file.

 

im not surprised really, if you think about how perfect the release timings have been over the last two years, i was actually thinking that this was going on before i read this thread.

i like how this guy put it: "There was none of this I come out with a $800 card that reigns for a year which gets eaten by a $450 card just to be trumped by a $600 card which is upgraded to a $650 card which is utterly destroyed by a $500 card." -megasty

it use to be 300, or 350 would buy you the best there was, but then this crap started.

 

Do ATi/nVidia actually make graphics cards? No, they develop the core and issue reference schematics for the suggested circuit to other companies, who then in turn buy the ATi/nVidia chip and build the graphics card. I work for a PCB subcontract manufacturer. We basically populate the PCB's. I know how much it costs to make a graphics card (not the cost of development) as we regularly make very low end graphics cards for fruit machines. These we sell for about £50 each to the fruit machine companies. They will obviously put on their charge (development overhead, manufacturing costs, profit etc.) so the price will probably equate to about £100 per card. Bear in mind these are not the high performing nVidia/Ati type GPU's we see in PC graphics cards, but low cost VIA type GPU's which cost about £7-£20 each. So stating the cost of a graphics card is wholely dictated by the GPU manufacturer is ridiculous. Blame the other companies involved as well for that stupid price that you see for the brand new graphics card you are going to buy.

 

This is what happens in 1v1.

When its a 3 person FFA, two people gang up on one and then start doing the same thing 1v1 does.

It's human nature to be absolutely inefficient.

 

Why is this thread so unpopular? This topic is HUGE!

 

Good question, I was for sure that people would be a bit more disappointed, at least the people that pay big bucks for video cards.

 

That's a very good point. I wonder what margins companies like BFG are making. I didn't think of this. Goes to show how many different factors are involved here. So really, the parties that would be brinig this issue to the fore (at least as far as claiming ATI/Nvidia are price fixing) would be the equip manufacturers, not the end consumers.

That said, while Nvidia doesn't manufacture their own boards, doesn't AMD/ATI do at least some of them themselves? I mean, AMD is a fab company, not just a licensor.

 

Oddly enough, I haven't seen much more media about this topic on the net, I thought it'd be everywhere by now!

It seems like nobody cares!?

And AMD/ATIs stock shot up over 10% in the last two days... Thank God, it was at the lowest point in 15 years or so.