Friday, January 23rd 2015
GeForce GTX 970 Design Flaw Caps Video Memory Usage to 3.3 GB: Report
It may be the most popular performance-segment graphics card of the season, and offer unreal levels of performance for its $329.99 price, but the GeForce GTX 970 suffers from a design flaw, according to an investigation by power-users. GPU memory benchmarks run on GeForce GTX 970 show that the GPU is not able to address the last 700 MB of its 4 GB of memory.
The "GTX 970 memory bug," as it's now being called on tech forums, is being attributed to user-reports of micro-stutter noticed on GTX 970 setups, in VRAM-intensive gaming scenarios. The GeForce GTX 980, on the other hand, isn't showing signs of this bug, the card is able to address its entire 4 GB. When flooded with posts about the investigation on OCN, a forum moderator on the official NVIDIA forums responded: "we are still looking into this and will have an update as soon as possible."
Sources:
Crave Online, LazyGamer
The "GTX 970 memory bug," as it's now being called on tech forums, is being attributed to user-reports of micro-stutter noticed on GTX 970 setups, in VRAM-intensive gaming scenarios. The GeForce GTX 980, on the other hand, isn't showing signs of this bug, the card is able to address its entire 4 GB. When flooded with posts about the investigation on OCN, a forum moderator on the official NVIDIA forums responded: "we are still looking into this and will have an update as soon as possible."
192 Comments on GeForce GTX 970 Design Flaw Caps Video Memory Usage to 3.3 GB: Report
A better way to test would be to use a game with a high res texture mod or something as to not overload the pixelfillrate. Most users are just cranking up DSR to get over 3.5GB and then think that the fps drop is due to the memory partition. Nai's benchmark is a CUDA program and the driver could be handling those different than a game.
Note that not a single actual further fact has surfaced since this story broke, yet the thread is moving as if its a constantly updating situation, when in fact it is just the same shit being regurgitated ad nauseam.
Three things seem certain:
1. Testing for this issue is not straightforward for the most part, and requires some effort and particular parameters to be met to be measurable - which goes some way to explain why many owners of the card seem fine with it - if you don't personally encounter a problem, it becomes more academic interest ( the prevailing attitude of owners of Evergreen series of cards during the GSoD phenomena - excepting the vociferous Apple owners of course (see point #3))
2. Most of the hysteria is coming from people who don't own, and would never consider owning the card, or any Nvidia card for that matter
3. Internet culture: Big business + conspiracy theory + overblown sense of entitlement + armchair activism. All that's missing is a trite naming convention alluding to Benghazi or ending in "-gate" (You know its coming).
Frankly it boils down to this:
Does the 970 have an issue above 3.5Gb in real world use? Likely answer is probable but not always. Does this mean Nvidia sold a small lie? Yes it absolutely does. Nvidia owners can't defend that. If it doesn't affect the 980 but does affect the 970, then they (NV) have been 'evasive' and deserve some form of backlash.
If you have a 970 and don't feel any effects of this PR 'lie' then feel free to comment - your contribution adds balance to real world usage.
If you're here trolling like a few are because you're anti NV, state facts, not opinions or at least, keep opinions civil and smart. Don't be retarded asswipes spouting shite.
The way I see a lot of posts here are NV owners saying it's not an issue. NV 'loyalists' blindly defending their brand choice and then their is the AMD crowd baying for blood.
And their are logical people saying yes it's quite bad NV have done this but is it affecting people in real life?
Some people need a cyber punch.
It is not something people should just ignore or else things like this become the norm.
If it was a non-issue. It would have been disproven long ago with the million or so of the 9xx series sold users disproving it. There would be no reason for Nvidia to release a statement after having meetings about it.
I do find it curious as to how few of them are in various forums given the owners clubs. I'm starting to think the majority just buy to showcase then return them with-in the return policy window. I was expecting way more test results being posted. Probably the same for both sides.
so is this christened 4gb-gate yet or what?
:rofl: that is the same thing copy pasted on another site dude.
this thread has made my weekend, the buttsore fanbois on one side and the stockholm syndrome on the other...priceless
If your implying Nv should give me a free upgrade to a 980, I agree.... I agree with you all!
$69 Asus Strix GeForce GTX 970 DCII
The shipping is what gets you. Its x3 the price of the card. LOL!
This isn't as bad as the bumpgate and nothing serious came out of that (they paid 200mill to settle but that's it). Plus they can always force the card to just use 3.5GB by drivers (which I suppose it already does).
If anything the marketing will be what hurts Nvidia the most by reputation or financially.
They should have taken a page out of AMDs PowerTune and used "up to" 4GB of memory or kept with the GPU Boost theme and called it "3.5GB base mem with 0.5GB boost"