To all American Cycles users; Samsung seeks to ban Nvidia products from the US

If Samsung has it their way, those who haven’t jumped on the GPU rendering bandwagon yet may have to move out of the United States if they want to do it.

If the suit succeeds, then the only option for GPU’s will be ATI, which means that all CUDA technology may become out of reach as well.

I still hope that ATI will get their drivers to where they work good with Cycles and I would like to see them make some headway in innovation again, but this doesn’t mean I’m backing Samsung on this wholeheartedly.

Samsung really isnt in the wrong though, they are responding to NVidia including them in a lawsuit that should be strictly aimed at Qualcomm.

Obviously Nvidia products wont be “banned” from the US. If the counter suit goes through, then it just means Nvidia will just settle out of court, probably by paying them out large sums of money. Its one of those “if you play with fire, you get burned” kind of situations.

All these companies are a bit stupid though, they allow their legal teams to have a sue happy field day with one another for anything they think they can get away with.

What SaintHaven said. Nvidia was shopping for a payout (Samsung having nice deep pockets), but obviously wasn’t paying attention to the suits between Samsung & Apple where both sides were willing to use the nuclear option of stopping sales within the US of their counterpart’s products.

Just my opinion, if I was the CEO of AMD, I would rather get back on top by showing superior products and drivers (because if a court case between your competitor and a different company does it), I would find it to kind of suck because I would never be able to show people that my solutions are actually superior.

Of course, now the real opinion of what AMD might want to see out of this, I don’t know at this point.

I wholeheartedly agree, but historically, that has rarely been the way in the these things are handled. The winner isn’t always the company with the best product; it’s the one with the best marketing. Take, for instance, how VHS came to dominate when Beta was clearly a better product.

But, I still agree with you. That’s the way things should be done.

Also in my opinion, since this is related to the ongoing patent wars and since it is getting to where it may affect the majority of Blender users (along with Blender development), this would be something that would make sense to me…

A company that files for a patent should be obligated by law to keep track of it and issue a prompt defense of it in cases where it finds a another company it violating it it or its terms of use (which might include a lawsuit). If a significant period of time passes where the company knows of the violation, but issues no warnings and/or takes no action, then it loses the exclusive rights to the patent (because chances are by then that the competitor has made millions or even billions off of using it). In this sense, I also think that small companies should be given some degree of leeway since they may not become aware quite as soon as the large entities.

Not sure how this turned into a discussion about AMD and what they should do with their ATI line up… but the reason Nvidia kicks their butt is primarily due to the fact Nvidia invests a lot in the software side of things. Better drivers, software advancements, things like PhysX and CUDA…ect They also played their cards right with how third parties make GPUs with their chips in them. From a hardware standpoint, ATI is fine but without the software backing and resources backing it up…they will be behind in the desktop PC market.

If the courts ban Nvidia products then you will have no choice but to buy ATI for graphics in the event you need a new card.

You claim that these types of suits rarely lead to outright bans on certain brands, hopefully that’s the case but there’s always a potential first time for it.

Sure, and there’s always the potential for all life on Earth to be wiped out at a moment’s notice by an extreme solar flare. Going with what’s probable here, Nvidia is going to find that you can only play litigation hardball if you are roughly the same size (or larger) than your opponent… or have nothing whatsoever to lose (the usual patent troll). Anything in between and you’re a smoking crater in the the judicial landscape.

Nvidia only really has two choices here - find a larger partner to fund their lawsuit (and their losses engaged during it) like Microsoft or Apple… or settle out of court before their cards are taken off the shelves. Their shareholders will not allow them to do anything else.

There will never be a sales ban from a suit like this. It’s corporate posturing and nothing more, and the average user will never even be aware that this was a thing.

Apple vs. Samsung did result in some products getting banned from US, Asian and European markets.

No, it was a very temporary ban on imports. In stock items didn’t even run out before the next shipment was allowed to come in again.

These are baseless exaggerations. Large companies lose litigation suits against small companies all the time, not just against patent trolls. NVIDIA is a multi-billion dollar company, they sure can afford a lawsuit. Even if they lose, it’s unlikely to break their neck. For comparison, the widely-reported Apple-Samsung lawsuit ended up awarding Apple a measly 120 million$.

Matt is correct in his assessment, this is unlikely to affect consumers in any significant way.

The ban was permanent, but since it was mostly about design details (rounded corners etc.), Samsung managed to quickly work around it.

nVidia cards are used in the supercomputers that, for example, DOE uses to model nuclear weapons and the NSA uses to crack codes.

Your AMD fanboyism is so pervasive that you really think nVidia products will be banned <sarcastic laugh>?

I disagree, but then again, not really that invested in arguing about it either. Simply put, it is my opinion (based on the history of most large company patent suits) that, if Samsung wins their injunction against the sale of Nvidia chips, they’ll settle their issue with Samsung out of court. As the patents in question are in the chips, as opposed to software, they cannot simply release a new version that’ll update existing stock. You clearly disagree. We’ll later see who is right & not - arguing here won’t change that.

However, as others have realised, the likelihood of it actually affecting the retail consumer is minimal either way.

Isn’t US the only country in the world that has software patents? And from that comes those guys who get software patents for things like @ sign or for-loop. What is wrong with americans, really. Honestly.

Well, to be fair to the US, they were, IIRC, the first country where it was proposed and implemented.
It was due to software patents failing to be a good idea in practice in the US that it has been actively avoided in other countries.
So say thank you to the US for being the necessary failure :slight_smile:

Canadians have been cross-border shopping for quite a while; if this goes down, perhaps it’s time for the traffic to go the other way. :slight_smile:

That’s not what I disagree with. You just removed the “Nvidia is going to find that you can only play litigation hardball if you are roughly the same size (or larger) than your opponent…” and “Nvidia only really has two choices here - find a larger partner to fund their lawsuit” aspects from your opinion. Luckily, the judicial system is not always on the side of the bigger fish. Those were the baseless exaggerations I was referring to. A settlement indeed is a likely outcome.