Tuesday, February 24th 2015
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"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
You can debate a 3.5 + 0.5 GB (of a lower spec) equals 4GB all you like. But as we know a Hyperthreaded 4 core is actually 2 REAL cores, and its not the same as a REAL 4 Core Chip. *nt*l said it out loud at the beginning, we bought it and loved it. If you think its not an apple to apple comparisson, its yours to decide.
So this letter is an undoubtable evidence of their screw up, and we have been given the right to do whatever we want with the 970, own your mistakes Nvidia, and shove it up your ...
Remember S3 was doing that:
EDIT: Either way, the GTX 970 will be a more driver dependent card, as Nvidia will probably have to spend more time working on how to manage this memory architecture with certain games.
He is also saying a 3GB card wasn't enough since more games are using more and more memory. Kind of shooting his explanation in the foot. You needed more memory but you slowed it down. Then have software to allocate less access data in the 512mb segment :banghead: That sounds more like software/driver efficiency "optimization" not architecturally limited to Maxwell.
They are making it seam like everything is put together at last minute. We all know the hardware goes through months of testing before its even stable.
The break down would have been from all departments to the marketing team if that's plausible.
how does the letter even make since.. they say they figured out how to add more memory in a way like it was so hard and had to spend millions in research on it.
maybe they should talk to asus and ask them how they fit full 4gb on a 750ti if they are so clueless.
i dont know what to say to whoever believes this trash but I will say it will be interesting to see who stands up to challenge this architectures great new feature.
Moving on: I have to say, it's obvious most people here are not familiar with how big companies work (rightly or wrongly is immaterial, it's reality). It's not uncommon at all for departments to not communicate thoroughly with each other, each in their own little turf, and who think and act as if they are THE central role of the company, with other departments merely supporting players. And no matter the product, the department that gets left out of the loop and looked down on the most? Marketing.
This all might have been contrite... except for the fact the GM204 had "engineered" in the "Memory Crossbars" to connect and unused memory controller to still use the L2 that was orphaned. This just opened up the sink-hole, did no one in PR help this knucklehead.
Though I thought I'd add to that and say that the fourth chair is still useable as the seat base still elevates one's butt off the ground however only at about 1/7th of the comfort of the rest of the chairs. Be happy that one's butt is not on the ground.
Who makes this stuff up?
When it comes to my purchases, I'll buy the best card for the money, I don't really care who it comes from. The way I understand it is before anything can even be accessed by the GPU, it has to be brought back into VRAM from system RAM then accessed. This is a lot slower than the wait cycle to access the non-critical partition. Basically the main VRAM has to page something else out to system RAM(because it is already full), then read the data it wants into VRAM. That is a long process compared to the wait time to directly access the non-critical area. Actually we already knew it was a cut down part. You obviously have no clue how hard it is to communicate technical shit to a marketing team. Almost everyone in this forum probably has more technical knowledge than anyone on a marketing team. If you tell the marketing team the card has 4GB, but 0.5GB of it is partitioned in a way that it is non-priority because the way the crossbar works now, you can disabled part of the L2, but still keep the memory controller associated with that L2 portion working by linking it over to the adjacent L2 portion, and because of this configuration the card has 64 ROPs but only 56 will be used because the other 8 ROPs are also accessed over this link to the adjacent L2 and it would actually hurt performance to use those extra 8 ROPs, even though they are enabled and technically could be used...
The marketing team is going to look at you with a blank stare and say "So the card is a 4GB card with 64 ROPs." Ironically, it was actually their attempt to not gimp the card as much as previous generations that bit them in the ass. If they did it the way they did in the past, the GTX970 would have been a 224-Bit 3.5GB card. However, the new method allowed them to not have to disabled that 32-bit memory controller and not loose the 0.5GB of memory that they normally would have had to.
And also the basis of any company is the communication between every of the work areas, what a coincidence that this communication problem happened when there was something bad with the card, why they don´t communicate the 980 was 3GB by mistake and then everyone realize it was actually a 4GB card.
Ok yes it is difficult to communicate somthing like this to the marketing team.... so what they did? maybe they lie the marketing team and just tell them the card is a 4GB card....