Tuesday, February 24th 2015
"It Won't Happen Again:" NVIDIA CEO Breaks Silence on GTX 970 Controversy
In the wake of bad PR, and a potentially expensive class-action lawsuit over the GeForce GTX 970 memory controversy, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wrote a candid letter addressed to everyone concerned, explaining in the simplest possible language what went wrong with designing and marketing the chip, how it doesn't affect the design-goals of the product, its quality or stability, and how it could be misconstrued in a whole different ways.
Huang's explanation of the issue isn't much different from the one we already have, but bears the final stamp of authority from the company, especially with the spate of discrepancies between what NVIDIA representatives post on GeForce forums, and what ends up being the company's position on certain things. Huang's letter signs off with "we won't let this happen again. We'll do a better job next time."
The transcript of Huang's letter follows.
Source:
NVIDIA
Huang's explanation of the issue isn't much different from the one we already have, but bears the final stamp of authority from the company, especially with the spate of discrepancies between what NVIDIA representatives post on GeForce forums, and what ends up being the company's position on certain things. Huang's letter signs off with "we won't let this happen again. We'll do a better job next time."
The transcript of Huang's letter follows.
Hey 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
140 Comments on "It Won't Happen Again:" NVIDIA CEO Breaks Silence on GTX 970 Controversy
I honestly see something more here overall than just an oversight, but that is just my opinion and Jen-Hsun's comment did not exactly help my opinion on that.
instead of marketing a 4GB and everybody getting pissed about only having 3.5GB.
No excuses and extremely unprofessional from a multi million/billion dollar company.
No, Jen-Hsun... No it is not...
This letter is about as apologetic as putting lemon juice in my eyes.
no offer to refund, no offer to upgrade, nothing! frigging CHEAT
4 months ago...
Me - "Did you hear about that new feature with the gtx970... I'm so excited by it!"
Friend - "No, what is it?"
Me - "I don't know. They haven't told us about it. So i'm excited by it!"
Friend - "That's great logic dude! I'm excited now too."
Some one sits on the fourth chair,
It collapses.
"Well we were originally going to sell it with only three chairs, but we found an innovative new way to add a fourth. The last one is made of cardboard and bubble gum. We thought you'd be excited!"
My own 970's are fantastic. They would have still been fantastic if they had not attempted to hide a "feature".
If they had not bothered to add in that last 1GB then the problem is where does the 780 end and the 970 start. So they tweaked the configuration and put-in a semi working feature with the hopes of controlling it with software designed to not allocate to that segment of memory.
What that statement is actually saying is we were hoping to force these cards to opperate as a 3.5GB card via drivers. So they had no intention of ever having the final user have access to the whole 4GB of memory. So in effect the statement he has given is more of a rod for his own back in this instance.
Bring me the popcorn this is better than Samsung V/s Apple.
All you people need to get over your hate on nVidia because this is nothing compared to what some other companies have done and never even bothered to apologize for. What nVidia did was a marketing mistake, it doesn't affect the performance of the card we bought compared to the reviews we all read.
You seem to be implying its okay and should be accepted because others do it as its common practice. That's a sad state to be in as a consumer.
What I'm directly saying, not implying anything, is that people need to cut nVidia some slack. Their mistake was on paper, on paper that was private, it didn't affect the performance we were promised through reviews. The card has not changed just because the specs on paper did. People shouldn't be buying cards on specs anyway, or name, they should be buying them based on the performance they get in reviews. And nVidia did not change that performance, AMD on the other hand did. AMD did cheat in the reviews, nVidia didn't. Yet, nVidia apologizes and people still want to bash, AMD never even comments on the problems when they get caught.That is the thing, having the 512MB only improves performance. Turning if off means that the card would start paging out to system RAM instead of accessing the 512MB, that is way worse.
Don't worry. As a consumer, my memory is shorter than that of an American voter. I'll still buy your stuff, even if you use lead paint and baby fetuses for thermal grease.
Your dearly beloved,
Fanboy.
When there are twice as many forum posts about (un)/locking overclocking of Nvidia mobile graphics cards than there is about the NSA secreting spyware in hard drive firmware across the whole planet, it's probably time to take stock of what kind of yardstick you measure wrongdoing by...IMO