NVidia & ATI Price Fixing

Here's something to think about guys.

A lot of us are sick of how litigous (sp?) society is nowadays.

This lawsuit is one of the first of the "stupid" lawsuits (mc donalds coffee burnt me, mc donalds made me fat) where the person filing the suit is "one of us"

This isn't some stupid fat greedy soccer mum.
This isn't some aggro guy pissed off that the product he abused broke.
This is an honest to god gamer, just like us - this makes this a full spec retarded lawsuit +500

Seriously this person needs someone to mail him a box of kleenex or something, what a fucking crybaby.

(for ref: in my opinion it's obvious that these products cost a lot to produce a shit load to manufacture and they release cheaper models or cut down models quite quickly - the latest G80 has more transistors than a CPUand that's the chip alone - of course it costs a lot)

Are you f*cking socialists, communists or what?

You Americans should be proud of you economics. If you don't have the money to buy something you want, you should start working more to make more money!

D/S and Time is money!

Next Geforce 9900 GTZX price, " your first born, your soul, and the deed to your house and car" or else... NO CARD FOR YOU!!!

Actually the problem lies with people buying cards at exhorbitant prices the makers' used to test the waters.

As long as there are suckers willing to throw away money like that, companies will be encouraged to release things at higher prices, just as developers are now able to release half-finished games to market.

As long as people continue to eat the crap they are fed, things will not change. As long as you bring it upon yourselves, you have no right to complain.

GPU:sold at higher prices :: games:released half-finished, where both are the result of people with too much money to throw away buying in and thereby impacting the marketplace for everyone.

wallstreet doesn't seem to give a shit about this lawsuit

Donuts and tequila eh? I haven't tried that one yet, but it sounds good to me.

Why don't you guys see why this is so wrong. Nvidia and ATI got together and said, don't sell your card for less then X. ATI and Nvidia are the only 2 players in the game, both Ati and Nvidia make more money by inflating the value of their cards then they would if their was a price war. Don't you think its a little strange that you can buy a nice pc for like 300-400 bucks but you have to spend that or MORE to buy a good graphics card? When they agreed to fix the prices they in effect created a monopoly in the graphics card industry, just with 2 parties. In every monopoly the consumer loses (thats you). If this was microsoft everyone would be going for their guns.

I can't afford a Ferrari. CONSPIRACY!

You are indeed correct dlr(2) about this only enriching lawyers (this is coming from a law student btw). Price fixing allegations are extremely asinine when it comes to high end video cards. They are luxury items!. If you think they are charging too much money, don't pay for it and the price will come down. This is not like milk or electricity. Let's face it, video cards are getting incredibly more complex and require increasingly insane amounts of man hours to produce. The Geforce 8800 took three times as long as the 7800 to create. This at a time when the PC gaming market, and I'm talking games that require such a card not the vast market of spider solitaire and pop cap players, is by many measures shrinking. You raise the cost to produce something without increasing the size of your potential market and the price has to come up, or you go out of business. nVidia and ATI do not have the luxory of pricing their items at a loss in order to make back profits on software. In fact, nVidia has to pay game companies money to put nVidia's logo on their software.
If you want to pay less money for a graphics card you can do one of several things:
1) Encourage nVidia and ATI to sell products at a loss, with the hope they can pull an Enron and operate at a loss for awhile.
2) Increase the size of the PC gaming market (you could perhaps blow up shipments of incoming next gen consoles, forcing people to go back to their PCs)
3) Lower the cost it takes to produce these incredibly complex cards (the 8800 has over 600 million transistors). Maybe you can petition ATI and nVidia to outsource all R&D to Burmha where you can pay skilled workers 10 cents an hour.
4) You can wait the five seconds it takes for the high end cards to drop in price. (pricegrabbered a 1900xtx lately?)

In the meantime...shut the #(@$&@# up!

People still haven't gotten the point. IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO CHARGE A LOT FOR SOMETHING! Just because something costs more than you want to pay for it, that doesn't mean that there aren't other people willing to drop the money. If ATI and nVidia charged (independently and with no illegal collusion amongst between the two) 1 million dollars to just look at the boxes their graphic cards come in, this wouldn't be illegal. People who see the rapid drop in card pricing over a year and then shout "there must be something shady going on" fail to understand the concept of DEPRECIATION. If I can sell a product for more and people are willing to pay that amount then more power to me. Simply put, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. The question is not, "are they charging more than their cards are worth," because if they did, by definition no one would buy them. The question is: are nVidia and ATI getting together to inflate pricing above that of the natural market? I doubt it, but that has yet to be seen. It is possible, but high pricing of any product does not prove that it is, only that some people are willing to pay a lot of money for something and the rest of us have to wait around and twiddle our thumbs for that amount to drop.

What ever happened to plain old not buying something that you feel is over priced? If large numbers of people didn't feel that it was worth the price they charge, then the cards wouldn't sell and the companies wouldn't be pricing these objects so damn high. It's not like you're forced to buy them, anyway.

Further proof that a large portion of the general consumers are retarded.

maybe this highlights one of the issues. http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/61/42/
the whole bios hacks thing seems to have died down with newer video cards.

Bull. Shit.

How can you think such a thing when prices drop by HALF in a year for equivalent hardware? When for the same $100 (or $200, or $500) every year you can buy a huge advancement in technology and speed?

How can you go after an industry that is advancing so fast? Isn't that almost proof in itself that consumers are getting a lot of value? Or is it a conspiracy to produce obsolescence?

The only reason graphics technology is advancing so rapidly is the competition between ATI and Nvidia. Since the death of 3dfx, the two have been fighting tooth and nail to become dominant in the market.

This is absurd.

This doesn't surprise me at all in this age of the "gimme" generation. I'd love to see the evidence of this supposed price fixing.

Sounds like a bunch of whiny kids with their priorities out of whack and no real knowledge of how the free market works decided to try to show "the man" their anti-capitalist mentality by wasting time and money in the courts.

Honestly, the prices don't seem THAT nutty. I mean these cards are fucking loaded with tech, half a gig of high speed ram, insanely clocked cores etc.

Yeah! More money for the lawyers. I know I'll never get anything out of it except maybe a $4.50 coupon off a full retail priced card.