Samsung is in another court battle, but this time it is not against smartphone rival Apple.

Rival smartphone chip maker, Nvidia, has been in a back-and-forth with Samsung for the better part of 2014, both fighting to get the other company's products banned from the U.S.

The latest move comes from Samsung, filing a complaint against Nvidia with the U.S. International Trade Commission, for use of Samsung patents on the Nvidia Shield gaming tablet.

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Samsung's move is a retaliation against Nvidia's own complaint, asking for all Galaxy phones in the U.S. with a Qualcomm or Exynos processor (basically all of them) to be removed from sales, due to patent infringement.

Neither side is willing to give full proof of the details, simply pointing to patents both own, which have very similar properties attached. Apple tried to ban Galaxy phones in 2013, but failed to get most of the list banned in the U.S.

Nvidia has been working on upgrades to graphical quality on phones, something they claim Samsung and Qualcomm - to some extent - have copied. Nvidia has not yet reached out to Qualcomm, which means it is most likely a Samsung specific issue.

In the fight to make smartphones even more powerful in the gaming world, Nvidia announced the Tegra K1 CPU - a graphical powerhouse for a mobile chip. Nvidia is also a leader in PC GPUs with the GTX and Tesla models.

The patents might seem on Nvidia side, being based in the U.S. is always a benefit, but most analysts predict a stalemate to come from this court battle. Neither side has definitive proof of copying and both seem fine pointing the finger at each other.

The U.S. patent system has been criticized by various experts, who believe it is too easy to patent an idea, concept or feature. This has lead to many court cases where the two companies have almost the exact same patent, with minor differences.

TagsNvidia, Nvidia Shield, GPU, mobile graphics, U.S. International Trade Commission, Galaxy phones