• @bestnerd@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    -25
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    This is weird. I’m all for anti-monopoly policies and court action, but this doesn’t make sense. Did Nvidia buy out smaller graphic companies? I may be ignorant but the only ones I know is AMD and ATI who merged, and now intel is making their own. I guess I don’t see how Nvidia is a monopoly

    E: I made this comment and the rest in the chain after a night of drinking high octane beers for my birthday. I’m an idiot

    • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      47
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      There’s more to anticompetitive behaviour than just buying out small companies…

      Nvidia has huge market share and uses their power as a weapon, in ways that are anticompetitive.

      For example, in the past, they bribed financially encouraged devs to implement over-the-top tessellation because they knew it hurt AMD cards more than their own. They even went as far as encouraging hidden, highly tesselated textures in games to do this. Such as full oceans under the ground, or highly tesselated hair being rendered on bald people, then turning the opacity down to make it invisible. All while still crushing performance.

      More recently, Nvidia had the GeForce Partner Programme. Basically, Nvidia was trying to strong-arm partners into essentially giving ownership of their branding to Nvidia, and banning them from using it with AMD products. Also banning branding AMD stuff as for gaming.

      E.g. under this scheme, Asus might only be allowed to use their “ROG” branding on Nvidia products, and they wouldn’t be allowed to have “Gaming” on their AMD products.

      Failure to join the GPP meant losing first access to GPUs, having less time to prepare for new launches, and worse pricing on GPUs bought from Nvidia.

      (Fortunately, though 2 OEMs joined GPP, public outcry killed it)

      Or how about Nvidia telling Hardware Unboxed and other reviewers that if they didn’t give Nvidia positive reviews, they’d fuck the channel over?

      Nvidia has done a lot of anticompetitive stuff.

    • Marius
      link
      fedilink
      English
      291 year ago

      According to this article, NVidia has a 80% market share over Discrete GPUs. https://wccftech.com/nvidia-retained-80-discrete-gpu-market-share-amd-20-in-q2-2022-despite-gaming-revenue-losses/

      That certainly count as monopoly (wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).

      Plus they tried to buy ARM recently.

      And in France, it’s not monopoly that’s illegal, but company in such situation have more legal restriction due to their potential bad influence on the market compared to smaller companies.

      • @grue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        (wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).

        Intel, more likely.

      • @bestnerd@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -191 year ago

        I get that but how’s that a monopoly? They own the market share cause of the product and performance of said product. They aren’t buying companies to boost their share, they failed the arm deal, and from what I’ve read aren’t keeping companies tied to their product. Chatgpt, Microsoft and others can use other hardware. When we look at other monopoly cases it’s due to a forced take over if the market like Microsoft or the current Amazon case. I’m not defending Nvidia outright, but I’m not seeing how a company who produces a better product is at fault of a monopoly.

        iOS has almost 60% market share, are they a monopoly cause people choose them as well?

        • @tabular@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          201 year ago

          A “better product” is only better by comparison to what the compitetion can do. It’s bold to assume that they make better because they are fairly better when Nvidia have a history of doing shady or unhanded tactics in a totally healthy market with 3 competitors.

        • AreaSIX
          link
          fedilink
          English
          141 year ago

          A monopoly is not necessarily connected to takeover of other companies to grow, so yes, they can be a monopoly. Also, iOS might have that market share in the US, but there are plenty of other markets dominated by Android. And lastly, 80% is a significantly larger market share than 60%, obviously.

        • @filister@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          81 year ago

          When you actively undermine your competitors and abuse your market position.

          And iOS is another player who is another great example why monopolies must be broken. They don’t play nice, all their apps are not present on other OSs, don’t forget the patent lawsuits at the beginning, the proprietary charging port, etc.

        • Marius
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          Well… Actually, monopoly is used in French for things that isn’t stricly speaking the sole actor (sorry). There are concurrence (mostly in the form of AMD and Intel in the PC DGPU market, and others in phone/mobile GPUs).

          And for mobile operating system, they would count as a duopoly. Aside of IOS and Android, there isn’t much (thought Android is a bit special by the fact it can be reused by other vendors without the google-specific parts).

          Actually, maybe the DGPU market could be seen as a triopoly (not much choice beside Intel, AMD and NVidia).

          (and if we don’t use the term of monopoly, we can still say for sure they are the main provider of DGPU, which is very likely to cause competition issue)