Wednesday, February 4th 2015
Specs Don't Matter: TechPowerUp Poll on GTX 970 Controversy
In the thick of the GeForce GTX 970 memory controversy, last Thursday (29/01), TechPowerUp asked its readers on its front-page poll, if the developments of the week affected the way they looked at the card. The results are in, and our readers gave a big thumbs-up to the card, despite the controversy surrounding its specs.
In one week since the poll went up, and at the time of writing, 7,312 readers cast their votes. A majority of 61.4 percent (4,486 votes) says that the specs of the GTX 970 don't matter, as long as they're getting the kind of performance on tap, for its $329.99 price. A sizable minority of 21.2 percent (1,553 votes) are unhappy with NVIDIA, and said they won't buy the GTX 970, because NVIDIA lied about its specs. 9.3 percent had no plans to buy the GTX 970 to begin with. Interestingly, only 5.1 percent of the respondents are fence-sitters, and waiting for things to clear up. What's even more interesting is that the lowest number of respondents, at 3 percent (219 votes), said that they're returning their GTX 970 cards on grounds of false-marketing. The poll data can be accessed here.
In one week since the poll went up, and at the time of writing, 7,312 readers cast their votes. A majority of 61.4 percent (4,486 votes) says that the specs of the GTX 970 don't matter, as long as they're getting the kind of performance on tap, for its $329.99 price. A sizable minority of 21.2 percent (1,553 votes) are unhappy with NVIDIA, and said they won't buy the GTX 970, because NVIDIA lied about its specs. 9.3 percent had no plans to buy the GTX 970 to begin with. Interestingly, only 5.1 percent of the respondents are fence-sitters, and waiting for things to clear up. What's even more interesting is that the lowest number of respondents, at 3 percent (219 votes), said that they're returning their GTX 970 cards on grounds of false-marketing. The poll data can be accessed here.
143 Comments on Specs Don't Matter: TechPowerUp Poll on GTX 970 Controversy
If you look at the number of people who are satisfied with the GTX 970 or will be buying it. It's a few percentage points down, but it does echo a little with NVIDIA's market share at around the 60 to 64% mark. Not sure if this is coincidence or there's more to it, but perhaps a vocal minority vs a buying majority. Who knows?
Makes me sad that so few are upset. I was waiting for Nvidia to offer some resolution, but it now seems likely they will do nothing.
On that note it seems nvidia will be skipping 16nm in favor of 14nm Samsung, either way waiting for a die shrink then I'll purchase my next GPU, I have personally had enough of the 28nm GPUs.
For me the most important thing about this "controversy" is that it's shown up who are the nVidia haters and/or morons who don't understand, or refuse to understand, how graphics cards work. Those of us who own GTX 970s, and are perfectly happy with them, are thankful for the amusement you've given us.
By all means condemn Nvidia but the frankly infantile responses to democratic polls from generally AMD owners is ironically a neon sign post to Red bias.
AMD in context sold the stock 290 cards that were unable to stay at their PR advertised boosts. In many cases they throttled well below 1ghz. I don't recall quite so much hate or as many posts on that misleading sales pitch.
It took custom solutions, months later to let the cards fly free.
I wouldn't touch a 970 knowing the issue and knowing my gaming resolution would maybe in a small % of games cause problems. But it doesn't mean I need to pour such illogical hatred and conspiracy on TPU.
And 'specs don't matter' is a valid point. My 3gb cards outperform 4gb cards, even at some 4k settings. Game coding is more relevant to performance in many cases.
Have Nvidia been dishonest? Of course.
Does the card still suit the vast majority of owners? Apparently.
Should Nvidia do something honest about it? Yes.
Will they? No.
Will I still buy Nvidia? If they still perform better than AMD, yes.
Even if its a tad expensive? Probably.
Would I buy AMD? If their card is better.
All very simple....
They are dishonest the entire time starting even with software things like PhysX where they hardcode, lockdown and block things that shouldn't be limited at all and then they act like it's our fault and that it's normal to be that way up to far more concerning things like this GTX 970 crap. I'm no fanboy of either camp, but when one side is continuously and repeatably dishonest like NVIDIA has been for several years now, I tend to buy from the other camp more. More people should think about this.
/Didn't vote in the poll
If nVidia would have been honest from the start about the real specifications of the GTX 970, nobody would have given it a second thought. The card does perform admirably (and I don't mean just raw performance here) and for a pretty decent price. But for some reason, they decided to let this one slip and lie to everyone. And this has "marketing decision" written all over it.
The 3.5GB "direct access" memory amount would seem to suggest a 224-bit bus, which wouldn't be anything new for nVidia (they had quite a few cards in the past that used atypical memory bus configurations). But someone in the marketing department probably looked at it and said "hey, they'll probably think a 256-bit bus is barely enough, they'll never buy a card with a 224-bit bus". And lo and behold, they slapped on the card the full amount of memory chips for a 4GB card and declared it as having a fully functional 256-bit bus, when in reality the core has a lower number of ROPs and whatever else than the GTX 980.
How many people would have minded about the GTX 970 having a different configuration for its memory and memory bus? Maybe a few. They'd probably complain about it on the forums and whatnot (like they always do, let's face it), but at the end of the day, it would have been a matter of you get what you pay for. If you want more, you pay more. Nothing to see here, move along.
Right now, however, they have people returning purchased cards on account of false advertising. Quite a few people are miffed about being lied to, and rightly so. I don't find false advertising something that is so easily forgivable. After all, what would happen if you, as a customer, would say you want to buy one of these cards, but would only pay less than the asking price at the cash register? What would happen then?