Comment Re:Is there any... (Score 1) 93
Is there any evidence (or even suspicion) that either side here used either the patent filing or actual stolen technology to create their product? If not then the laws are clearly broken when we are allowing non-revolutionary ideas to be patented.
NVIDIA holds a very large graphics patent pool. In a lot of ways they're the successor to SGI, and in the interim have picked up companies such as 3dfx, which has further enlarged their patent pool. Which makes it very, very hard to efficiently implement a GPU without violating some of those patents. Proving malice may be difficult, but it's hard to imagine building a competitive GPU and not infringing on those patents.
As for whether the patents are revolutionary, that's a trickier point. If you researched into the same problems as NVIDIA a lot of your solutions would be similar/identical even without seeing how NVIDIA does it. But for a number of these patents the solutions are non-obvious; it's only after doing research and a lot of simulation do you come up with the same answer.