GeForce G310 Fermi - Nvidia news! 2010

Nvidia has lost a lawsuit against OPti for a chipset technology and will be forced to pay, and perhaps even review the products they already have in the market. The judge has sentenced that Nivida used, without the required payment, an OPTi Inc technology from February, 1st, 2007 to April, 30th, 2008. For that reason, Nvidia will need to pay OPti $3.75 million, more exactly $750.000 per trimester.

The two companies had reached a license agreement on 2007, as a solution for a patent infringment that had been claimed by OPTi against NVidia on 2004. The agreement imposed Nvidia the payment of $750.000 in royalties, in case the company continued to use the technology, for up to twelve installments.

The patent in question, according to rumors, would be the PCI Prefetch from the chipset. Fudzilla affirms that Nvidia would now be forced to remove the feature from their chipset, and those include the versions from nForce 500 up to the more recent ones. Moreover, Nvidia would have to contact their partner in order to remove the BIOS with the PCI Prefetch code from the websites, and also develop “clean” BIOS for the current motherboards on the market.