Whether this class action lawsuit will have merit remains to be seen.

The private lawsuit reported in the Inquirer article is obviously an attorney attempting to get into a key position if the Department of Justice subpoenas turn up any evidence of price fixing -- which is illegal, even if both companies did spend a lot of money on R&D, given their market positions.

Traditionally, antitrust lawyers would wait to follow a DoJ investigation and then bring their lawsuits -- sue if DoJ wins, don't if DoJ drops it -- but the lawyer here obviously wanted to claim that he or she should get lead plaintiff counsel status if the DoJ finds something, so he filed now.

If DoJ drops it, I hope AMD and NVidia sue the lawyer into bankruptcy.

What I want to know is why the DOJ is trying to prove that ATI and Nvidia are fixing prices instead of trying to see who's fixing these d@mn memory prices! Seriously, these prices seem to be going up instead of down, and there's really no way they can cost enough to manufacture to warrant these ridiculous prices.

The development costs are enormous... the 8800 family was 4 years in development and in the Anandtech article on the 8800, $475million was quoted as the total development cost.
So that means they would have to sell around 950,000 x 8800 series cards to break even.....hmm.

video cards are way too expensive... Top end product should be no more than $400 and it's lower sibling at $300.... Mid ends should start at $200... Low ends should be $100 even with inflation...

$600 for video gaming card is ridiculous!

I remember reading somewhere that Hi-end hardware is what makes cash for v-card companies now, but given I don't have a link you can just ignore this post.

Then again when I paid for 7900GT I knew what I was paying for, even tho it's crazy expensive...

The problem is these prices really are ridiculous.

If PC Gaming is going to expand and beat consoles again, then we can't have vendor systems from the likes of Dell, Gateway, HP, etc. shipping without video cards because they're too expensive. We can't play good games because no one has the hardware to do so. It's too expensive.

Even spending $100 just gives you a "basic" solution that has bad framerates.

Seems the market will bear a $500 video card, so why not sell it for that price? Sounds more like capitalism rather than price fixing.

Its been my opinion that ATi and nVidia have been informally "plyaing ball" for quite some time regarding card prices, but not necessarily price fixing. They both see that a person will spend money for a video card, so they are allowing that person to spend it.

There is a difference between price discrimination and price fixing...

Like nobody didn't know ATI and Nvidia were price fixing. It probably started around when ATI cards were jacked up in price but not Nvidia cards.

This is the reason why I wanted a 3rd competitor. Say Hello to Intel.

This is a bit funny considering how fast the market is moving. ATI and Nvidia are cutting edge silicon processing technology. GPU technology is advancing at an incredible rate.

No one is forcing you to buy a $500 card. It isn't even the slightest bit necessary.

What are we going to have next, someone sue Mercedes-Benz and BMW because their luxury cars aren't as cheap as a Chevy?

ATI (now AMD) vs NVIDIA when it comes to graphic cards seems a very competitive environment to me. Sure, the price of high end graphic cards may have increased (probably not, if you take inflation into account) I would not say that they have been necessarily fixed. A company seems to charge ridiculously when it has the only comparable product in a specific price range, but who wouldn't? (8800GTX comes to mind). Furthermore, it is still cheaper than a X1950XTX crossfire setup, and performs about the same. Certain high end offerings are also overpriced when they are compared to the mid-range offerings of the same class. X1950XTX and 7900GTX are far overpriced versus the just slightly slower X1950XT and 7950GT for instance, but for some people a small performance boost may be worth it. Even if it is price-fixing at that stage, everyone else does it for their top end products as well. All the Extreme Editions and FX's are far more extreme examples of hosing the consumer and nobody complains about that. All this brings me to a few concusions:

1. It is always cheaper to buy the equivalent amount of graphic power one year later.
In other words, the same amount of money will also always buy a faster graphic card the following year.

2. Also the increase in avaliable graphic power at specific price points is always greater than the increased requirements by games of the same period. In other words graphic power is increasing much faster than games requirements increase.

3. ATI and NVIDIA only have the incentive to create new video cards because of profits, and as a result, innovation continues.

4. The 8800GTX is actually a good value considering its performance. It has more performance per dollar and performance per watt than most cards sold today. The only cards that rival it in performance per dollar are probably the X1950 Pro and the X1950XT, and the only card that rivals it in performance per watt is probably the 7600GT. So overall, it is a very good card that is part of a card lineup that will give better performance per dollar than previous generation cards. Not to mention the high end cards are usually the most inflated in price, which means that the rest of the 8800 series will probably be excellent value.

I don't see whats wrong with this model of pricing. Just because it's out, doesn't mean you have to purchase a 8800GTX. In the end everbody wins. The consumer with a large checkbook gets exceptional graphic performance without having to go SLI, however being able to in he wants to, the cheap patient consumer will get rather powerful, cheap mid-range chips and NVIDIA makes enough money to start a new wave of innovation. For now, ATI is cleaning up the lower cash brackets, and will eventually compete with the R600 and drive prices down.

Whether price fixing exists or not, the consumer still ends up with more powerful hardware at the same price bracket..

How can I launch a class action lawsuit against people who are ignorant of computers?

The loser of a class action lawsuit should be made to pay the legal fees of the winner. I bet the number of stupid lawsuits would decline. I'm sure lawyers would never want that to happen though!

The verdict of a class action lawsuit does not really matter because the lawyers always win.

Maybe we can start a class action lawsuit against lawyers. Know anyone who will take the case?

This started out with one dude. Random Consumer A got pissed that they wanted 500$ for an 8800GTX, decided to sue the companies for price fixing. Since then, people are jumping on board looking for cash. This just smells of bull**** to me.

I can't believe that if this were to actually have merit, that various national, international, and global business agencies wouldn't have caught this long ago.

This seriously sounds to me like some random people trying to make a few bucks with a lawsuit, which has been an alarming trend in the last decade.

Whatever happened to people WORKING for their money *sigh*

nvidia doesn't even make video cards, and there are plenty of 3rd-party ATI chipset card makers, so technically they'll have to prove that they also forced manufacturers to price the cards the same regardless of the cost of the GPU chip itself. They also tend to release new GPUs at different times. And regardless of the price, they ARE having to compete, even if they don't have "price wars", because they have to keep speeding up what model GPU they have at what price point. A price war only occurs if you have two brands of pretty much the same thing, that don't change. So they do sort of have price wars with each generation and performance level. nvidia makes the GF7800 500 dollars, ATI makes the X1900 500 dollars, nvidia drops the 7800 to 400, ATI drops the 1900 to 400 dollars.

Do automakers "fix prices" because the price of a car averages 18000 to 24000 dollars, and goes up over time, instead of constantly going down?

Oh yeah, and exactly what kind of expert testimony is "as a consumer, I noticed...", no matter who says it? That's not evidence, that's hearsay, anecdotal. And has s/he not noticed that prices on video cards actually go up over the years, though not rapidly?

Here's a novel concept. If you don't what to spend $500, don't.

You only need a $500 card if EVERYONE buys one, which then tends to influence content to require one.

The amount we ALL spend on graphics cards is influenced by the average. If the typical targeted-by-developer graphics card is $X, then that's what you will need to spend to reach the expected level of performance.

How people can complain about such a quickly advancing technology is beyond me. Wait a year and prices drop by HALF for the same level of technology.

From what I've read, it's not a question of them agreeing to drive prices UP, it's all about ATI and Nvidia letting each other know ahead of time what their price/performance models for the next season would be, ahead of time.

I have no doubts whatsoever that this did happen.

No merit. GPUs are not commodity parts like memory. The development costs are enormous... the 8800 family was 4 years in development and in the Anandtech article on the 8800, $475million was quoted as the total development cost. Much of the development costs of all new-technology electronic devices is recovered from the "early adopters". Hence the very high prices early in the product cycle... in the case of early-cycle GPUs at least half of the per-chip price charged by either Ati or nVidia to the board manufacturers is amortized development costs. The prices that the retail purchaser sees for comparable performance video cards from both companies are very comparable. That is not a cartel symptom at all; you will note that the corresponding GPUs are also very similar in size and complexity, the development costs are thus very similar, and since they typically come from the same silicon-fab (TSMC) and are frequently on the same process, the chip-costs are likely to be closely similar also. Ati and nVidia have been in fierce cutthroat competition since the demise of 3dfx. Both companies will have reams of competitive information to back
up that assertion.

is it illegal to have a tech war at set prices instead of a price war with set technology?

I want to believe this, but I think it will either be thrown out or that lawyers will be the primary beneficiaries of it.

edit: meant to be a reply

Fixed prices? That is a bunch of bull.

The problem is that GPUs and their reference PCBs are becoming more and more complex to develop. Their rapid development cycles are not exactly helping the MSRP ether. Just take a look at difference between a Voodoo 1 to a 8800GTX.

The more important matter is that nether company is forcing the market to spend $500+ on a video card. Just have a ounce of patience and wait six months to get a cut-down verison that practically has the same performance at 1280x960 and 1600x1200 for $200-250.

I, for one, don't enjoy paying 500 Euros for my graphics cards.

Go, get them, DOJ!

If i get the 8800GTX at $250 then i have no issues ;)

HAHA! Sweet. I've got reciepts from enought cards to care about this one.

I hope they get sued, maybe they can stop this price fixing crapola.

If this is true they will end up owing me a lot of money. :p