The United States Supreme Court is about to decide on two cases brought by NVIDIA and Meta (Facebook) to avoid legal action against them for fraud on securities. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear NVIDIA's arguments on November 13 regarding the dismissal attempt of the securities class action lawsuit. Swedish investment firm E. Ohman J:or Fonder AB claims NVIDIA misled investors in 2017-2018 by understating its revenue dependency on cryptocurrency mining. NVIDIA's stand lies in the plaintiff's failure to meet the criteria established by the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Earlier this year, NVIDIA settled with the U.S. regulatory authority to pay $5.5 million to settle charges about the poor reporting of crypto mining's impact on its gaming segment.

The Supreme Court is also set to adjudicate the case brought by Facebook to dismiss the securities lawsuit where investors led by Amalgamated Bank accused the company of deceiving them by not revealing a 2015 data breach that involved Cambridge Analytica and which, in turn, affected more than 30 million users. The case came to the fore after Facebook's stock tanked in the light of reports about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of user data during the 2016 Trump campaign. Facebook maintains it wasn't obliged to disclose past breaches in risk statements, as these are supposedly forward-looking. The company had previously paid $100 million in penalty to the SEC and $5 billion to the FTC over the same issue. Recently, three Supreme Court decisions in June had eroded federal regulators, namely the SEC which is the principal regulator of securities fraud, and appear to bring more limitations to the power of private plaintiffs to be able to enforce federal rules set out for corporate misconduct.

The U.S. Department of Justice has stepped up its probe into NVIDIA and several other companies in the hopes of gaining evidence that NVIDIA could have violated antitrust laws. The DOJ moved from sending questionnaires to issuing subpoenas requiring recipients to provide more information. This puts the government one step closer to potentially filing a formal complaint. Antitrust officials are concerned that NVIDIA might be making it difficult for customers to switch to other suppliers and could be penalizing those who don't exclusively use its AI chips, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The probe, which first came to light in June via Bloomberg, has seen investigators reaching out to other tech companies for information. The DOJ's San Francisco office is leading the inquiry, though the department has declined to comment publicly on the matter. In response to the investigation, NVIDIA said in an emailed statement that its market dominance is due to the superior quality and performance of its products. "NVIDIA wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers, who can choose whatever solution is best for them".

NVIDIA has reportedly been hit with a US Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust probe over the tactics the company allegedly employs to sell or lease its AI GPUs and data-center networking equipment, "The Information" reported. Shares of the NVIDIA stock fell 3.6% in the pre-market trading on Friday (08/02). The main complainants behind the probe appear to be a special interest group among the customers of AI GPUs, and not NVIDIA's competitors in the AI GPU industry per se. US Senator Elizabeth Warren and US progressives have been most vocal about calling upon the DOJ to investigate antitrust allegations against NVIDIA.

Meanwhile, US officials are reportedly reaching out to NVIDIA's competitors, including AMD and Intel, to gather information about the complaints. NVIDIA holds 80% of the AI GPU market, while AMD, and to a much lesser extent, Intel, have received spillover demand for AI GPUs. "The Information" report says that the complaint alleges NVIDIA pressured cloud customers to buy "multiple products". We don't know what this means, one theory holds that NVIDIA is getting them to commit to buying multiple generations of products (eg: Ampere, Hopper, and over to Blackwell); while another holds that it's getting them to buy multiple kinds of products, which include not just the AI GPUs, but also NVIDIA's first-party server systems and networking equipment. Yet another theory holds that it is bundle first-party software and services to go with the hardware, far beyond the basic software needed to get the hardware to work.

We've seen NVIDIA's move to provide RTX effects on older, non-RT capable hardware today being met with what the company was certainly expecting: a cry of dismay from users that now get to see exactly what their non-Turing NVIDIA hardware is capable of. The move from NVIDIA could be framed as a way to democratize access to RTX effects via Windows DXR, enabling users of its GTX 1600 and 1000 series of GPUs to take a look at the benefits of raytracing; but also as an upgrade incentive for those that now see how their performance is lacking without the new specialized Turing cores to handle the added burden.

Whatever your side of the fence on that issue, however, NVIDIA has provided users with one more raytraced joy today. Three of them, in fact, in the form of three previously-shown tech demos. The Star Wars tech demo (download) is the most well known, certainly, with its studies on reflections on Captain Phasma's breastplate. Atomic Heart (download) is another one that makes use of RTX for reflections and shadows, while Justice (download) adds caustics to that equation. If you have a Turing graphics card, you can test these demos in their full glory, with added DLSS for improved performance. If you're on Pascal, you won't have that performance-enhancing mode available, and will have to slog it through software computations. Follow the embedded links for our direct downloads of these tech demos.