Friday, January 23rd 2015

GeForce GTX 970 Design Flaw Caps Video Memory Usage to 3.3 GB: Report

by
btarunr
 Discuss (192 Comments)
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

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192 Comments on GeForce GTX 970 Design Flaw Caps Video Memory Usage to 3.3 GB: Report

#176
64K
Brian@NVIDIAIf any of you feel the need to return the GTX 970 that you have purchased, knowing what you know about the performance in your system, you should return it. Get a refund or an exchange. You should do what will give you the best gaming experience possible and if you need help to get that done let me know, we'll help.
Some of your partners have already said they will not be doing returns based on the misrepresented specs of the GTX 970. Also why would anyone want to do an exchange when they would just be getting the same thing that they aren't happy with already. For me I am enjoying my GTX 970 and haven't had any problems with it. I would like a partial refund though.
Posted on Reply
#177
dwade
EVGA said no refund because I bought it somewhere else. Tigerdirect just gives me the middle finger. So yeah... I have to deal with this awful coil whine along with nerfed VRAMs now. I can't think of any GPU I've ever purchased that's as bad as this one.
Posted on Reply
#178
Nullifier
dwadeEVGA said no refund because I bought it somewhere else. Tigerdirect just gives me the middle finger. So yeah... I have to deal with this awful coil whine along with nerfed VRAMs now. I can't think of any GPU I've ever purchased that's as bad as this one.
Sounds like BS to Me.
EVGA has always had the return items to us policy, and have always been nothing but helpful to me and others who I know.
Thats one thing EVGA is really well known for, their RMA, Step Up Policy, and Customer support....
Posted on Reply
#179
xorbe
rruffAnd I'm guessing Nvidia did nothing about that? They are still selling those [660] cards...
Right, but the unbalanced vram was documents, reviewed, and known upfront.
Posted on Reply
#180
EatGamer
dwadeEVGA said no refund because I bought it somewhere else. Tigerdirect just gives me the middle finger. So yeah... I have to deal with this awful coil whine along with nerfed VRAMs now. I can't think of any GPU I've ever purchased that's as bad as this one.
This is a bit off brand for EVGA. I work for NVIDIA and know those guys well. If you PM me your email and incident ID/ticket # with them I can maybe look into it.
Posted on Reply
#181
xfia
scam? you cant just ask for peoples personal info. if you work for nvidia you should register with tpu as such and have a badge saying so.

the other so called nvidia employee has yet to respond.. so whats the deal?
Posted on Reply
#182
EatGamer
xfiascam? you cant just ask for peoples personal info. if you work for nvidia you should register with tpu as such and have a badge saying so.

the other so called nvidia employee has yet to respond.. so whats the deal?
He went home. I'm still around. If a mod wants to contact me to verify, that's fine.
Posted on Reply
#183
mouacyk
EatGamerHe went home. I'm still around. If a mod wants to contact me to verify, that's fine.
I asked you to provide verification of association with NVidia on the OCN forums and have not received any reply. It seems the mods don't care about their own community and you might be taking advantage of that fact.
Posted on Reply
#184
RCoon
EatGamerHe went home. I'm still around. If a mod wants to contact me to verify, that's fine.
xfiascam? you cant just ask for peoples personal info.
mouacykI asked you to provide verification of association with NVidia on the OCN forums and have not received any reply. It seems the mods don't care about their own community and you might be taking advantage of that fact.
I'm not high enough up to say officially or change his new member title to rep, but I can confirm his IP is shared with Brain@NVIDIA.

Frankly, if he were a random internet person that wants to profess his love of your case number via your email address, I wouldn't judge that much.
dwadeI can't think of any GPU I've ever purchased that's as bad as this one.
Heh, I've bought a few stinkers in the past that surpassed this in terms of horror.
Posted on Reply
#185
RejZoR
Constantine YevseyevNVIDIA (and basically all of their retail partners) cannot ship a device unless it passes specific tests, including writing memory with digits until it's full. If some addresses are never reached, the test utility will simply print nice red "FAILED" string on the display.

I won't believe that engineers are so stupid these days that they don't know how to manage device memory (or at least how to make sure that it's accessible at runtime).
The issue is not writing/reading from memory, it's the speed at which you do that, particularly in the last 0,5GB of memory...
Posted on Reply
#186
Rahmat Sofyan
BiggieShadyIt would be great if any owner of GTX 970 could do that, but as an NVIDIA representative how can you speak for all different card manufacturers about their product exchange/refund policies?
Yeahhh... in my country, really hard to do that, any brand!
Posted on Reply
#187
Tatty_Two
Gone Fishing
Might I suggest that anyone who contributes here and claims they "represent" NVidia or any other company messages W1zzard with their credentials, @W1zzard will then give them a custom title to confirm their status...... thank you.
Posted on Reply
#189
rruff
The NGalax 970 EXOC Black Edition design to Work fine on V-ram allocation - Reported
That's 3 week old news.
Posted on Reply
#190
Faïçal HMD
please , try update the bios of GTX970 to GTX980 ... Thanks
Posted on Reply
#191
xorbe
Faïçal HMDplease , try update the bios of GTX970 to GTX980 ... Thanks
Generally the parts are fused making this impossible. At one time, some cards could be flashed to semi-Quadros.
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