Nvidia is not a patent troll. The company has invested billions of dollars into R&D over the decades and has done a great deal of important work with gamers, developers, and hardware engineers to build great GPUs. No matter which GPU manufacturer you prefer, Nvidia deserves credit for its own work — which is why I was surprised to see the firm announce today that it had sued both Samsung and Qualcomm for supposedly infringing on seven different GPU patents. One of the patents is an absolute humdinger: It asserts that the GPU itself — a single chip with “all the functions necessary to process graphics and light up screens — is a foundational invention of Nvidia.

There are two reasons why this case sticks out. First, Nvidia, is suing Samsung — a company which does not build its own graphics IP and merely licenses the work of others, including Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali, and Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR. Nvidia’s blog post claims that Samsung dismissed these issues as a “supplier problem,” ignoring the fact that from Samsung’s perspective, that’s exactly what this is.

Second, while it’s true that this is Nvidia’s first patent lawsuit against another company, many of the patents the company is asserting go right back to the beginning of the GPU era. Nvidia is accusing Samsung and Qualcomm, for example, of violating its patent on transform and lighting engines — a patent that dates back to the early days of 3D accelerated games, some 13 years ago. Most of the other patents are nearly as old, and cover equally fundamental aspects of modern GPU programming.

Sue everyone for everything

No, Nvidia hasn’t filed suit against ARM or Imagination Technologies directly but it’s hard to see how those companies wouldn’t be in the GPU developer’s crosshairs given that it’s targeting their products. According to Nvidia’s filed depositions, both ARM’s Mali and PowerVR are in violation. It may not target those companies (Nvidia likely doesn’t want to go up against ARM, given that the latter controls its CPU licensing), but this is an obvious attempt to throw as wide a net as possible over the entire industry.

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It doesn’t help the optics of the situation that they’re also asking the courts to ban the import, sale, resale, or shipments of… pretty much every single product Samsung manufactures that includes a GPU from ARM, PowerVR, or Qualcomm. Oddly, Nvidia does not ask for the same for Qualcomm.

Nvidia is casting this as a beleaguered company attempting to claim some fraction of the compensation its entitled to, but it’s hard to see this as a David vs. Goliath story when the two companies getting sued just happen to be its primary competition. Samsung licenses its graphics IP, it doesn’t develop it independently. Furthermore, if ARM’s Mali is in violation of Nvidia’s patents, as Nvidia alleges, why isn’t Nvidia having that conversation with ARM?

I haven’t spoken to the actual patent claims themselves because most of them are extremely broad, and I’m a journalist, not a patent lawyer. What I will say is that Nvidia’s choice of targets seems quite tailored.

Were Nvidia to succeed with these lawsuits, it would effectively gain royalty fees or compensation for virtually every device on the market. The only GPU manufacturer I’m aware of that isn’t listed is Vivante — and they have a small presence in budget hardware. It’s also worth noting that the wording in Nvidia’s blog post suggests that it has already secured patent licensing deals with other companies. If Nvidia really does own the IP for the GPU itself, then it could be very lucrative indeed.