Sunday, February 22nd 2015

Class Action Lawsuit Filed against NVIDIA over GTX 970 Memory Issue

by
btarunr
 Discuss (63 Comments)
We haven't heard the last of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 memory allocation controversy, not by a long shot. Owners of the card, after having compiled technical information and details over weeks, filed a class-action lawsuit in a US Court (District Court for the Northern District of California). The lawsuit, titled "Andrew Ostrowsky (and others in similar situation) vs. NVIDIA Corporation and GIGABYTE Global Business Corporation," accuses the defendants of unfair, unlawful, and deceptive business practices, in three separate charges, and misleading advertising, demanding for Jury Trial.

The lawsuit goes on to read that the amount in controversy exceeds US $5 million, and encompasses over 100 Class members, meeting the minimal diversity clause, with the plantiff and numerous Class members being citizens of different states than the defendants. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of misleading buyers of the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards with memory amount (being 3.5 GB with a 0.5 GB "spillover," and not the advertised 4 GB), ROP count being 56 and not 64 (as communicated to the media at launch, and to buyers through them); and L2 cache amount being 1.75 MB and not 2 MB. If you are eligible to be a Class member, find details of the law firms involved in the lawsuit document.

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63 Comments on Class Action Lawsuit Filed against NVIDIA over GTX 970 Memory Issue

#51
HumanSmoke
RazorfangSweet gorilla of Manila!
+1 Central Bureaucracy
Posted on Reply
#52
Uplink10
The Way It's Meant to be Ripped Off | NVIDIA
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#53
Xzibit
Jen-Hsun On GeForce GTX 970
Nvidia BlogHey everyone,

Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.

We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.

GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.

Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.

Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.

Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.

This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.

The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.

This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.

We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.

Jen-Hsun
You all should be thankful this wasn't a 3GB card because more and more games are using more memory right ?

Hardware and software teams knew but poor marketing were left out of the loop. :(
Posted on Reply
#54
riffraffy
How do you think those ISIL members feel went they get to heaven and find out it's 71 virgins and 1 midget . You mean I gave my life for this crap , they promise 72 !
Posted on Reply
#55
dorsetknob
"YOUR RMA REQUEST IS CON-REFUSED"
riffraffyHow do you think those ISIL members feel went they get to heaven and find out it's 71 virgins and 1 midget . You mean I gave my life for this crap , they promise 72 !
More to the point they do not promise that the 72 virgins will be Female

sounds familiar Nfiddla
Posted on Reply
#56
Toothless
Tech, Games, and TPU!
Threeeaaaddd necroooooooo.
Posted on Reply
#57
dorsetknob
"YOUR RMA REQUEST IS CON-REFUSED"
was reading who was online and saw the spider robot Baidu was scanning the thread so i was boored and well......its above and all over china now Snigger :)
Posted on Reply
#59
mouacyk
And a whole lot of people can eat crow...
Posted on Reply
#60
R0H1T
mouacykAnd a whole lot of people can eat crow...
And they (Nvidia) still got away with less than a slap on their wrist, just like Intel :shadedshu:
Posted on Reply
#61
mouacyk
R0H1TAnd they (Nvidia) still got away with less than a slap on their wrist, just like Intel :shadedshu:
It's useful as another precedence case, even though there was technically no legal ruling. At least the wilderness was push back a little among other things.
Posted on Reply
#62
R0H1T
mouacykIt's useful as another precedence case, even though there was technically no legal ruling. At least the wilderness was push back a little among other things.
Not sure how an out of court settlements work as a precedent? If anything a court ruling would've likely made others (like Intel, Apple, IBM et al in the past) think more than twice, about conning their customers.
Posted on Reply
#63
dorsetknob
"YOUR RMA REQUEST IS CON-REFUSED"
mouacykIt's useful as another precedence case, even though there was technically no legal ruling.
As far as i understand it
Its a Case Summary Admission... no precedent Set ( no legal ruling to establish precedent made and no statement of case Precedent made because no legal ruling made )
its a Civil case after all
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