Video Card People Charged in Class Action - News

Class actions charged against NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) reveal that the two companies may have staged a competition over the past half-a-decade or so. A judge read out an email which suggested price fixing was rife in the graphics card market. That follows a class action of 51 different plaintiffs, now combined into one, and across different legal jurisdictions, alleging cartel behaviour not only in graphics chips, but flat panels and CRTs too.

In other words, NVIDIA and ATI may have been fixing prices of their products for a while now, it is believed that they held secret meetings to discuss staged competition, chart out prices, timings of product launches among other things. These pseudo-competitions staged provided improved sales among other things.

I cannot imagine that this comes as a surprise to anyone. The whole industry is designed around the idea of inflated prices. It doesn't actually cost Intel any more money to make an E8200 than an E8500, but the latter costs an extra $200. Trying to figure out what people are willing to pay is what the business is really about, but it is a little shifty for the two competitors to get together and decide what that amount is secretly.

It's all fun and games until a price war runs amok.

[Read Full Story at techPowerUp!]

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