Nvidia on Thursday announced they have filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm and Samsung. The graphics maker is accusing the two of infringing on several of its graphics processing unit patents and is seeking to block shipments of several Samsung Galaxy devices including the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge - both unveiled on Wednesday at IFA 2014 in Berlin.
The patent suit, the first in Nvidia's 21 year history, was filed with the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the US District Court in Delaware. In it, the company is asking the ITC to block shipments of Samsung Galaxy mobile phones and tablets containing Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali or Imagination's PowerVR graphics architectures.
Nvidia has also asked the Delaware court to award damages for the infringement of the patents.
In a blog post on the matter, the chipmaker said their licensing team negotiated directly with Samsung on a patent portfolio license. They held several meetings to demonstrate how the patents apply to all of Samsung's mobile devices and to all the graphics architectures they use.
Nvidia said they made no progress as Samsung repeatedly told them it was mostly their suppliers' problem.
Specifically, Nvidia said they have chosen seven patents from their portfolio to pursue in the lawsuit including technology related to programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing in GPUs.
Samsung declined to comment on the matter while Qualcomm wasn't immediately available for comment.