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
:shadedshu:
Of course, normal to me is crisp, smooth, colourful and immersive. If you require different parameters might I suggest a ZX Spectrum.
Every one of your posts that I've seen about this has been trying to minimize the issue. What do you suggest people do? Look at how profitable Nvidia has been lately and praise the company for their bait and switch marketing and flawed designs?
The sales of "refurbished & open box" 970s are already starting, so anyone who blames NVIDIA and can't see a way ~not~ to choke on your 970s, send them back so we, (us po' boys) can buy them for less money.
Nothing changes the performance in reviews when they were introduced, they're still the same.
You actually believe that a few outcries from a group of people (many of whom would never entertain owning an Nvidia product regardless of the issue or not) and whom represent a miniscule percentage of the consumer buying base, somehow wield enough power to cause a paradigm shift in OEM/ODM and consumer buying trends?
Were Nvidia and AMD taught any lesson when the colluded to price fix discrete graphics? When was the last price war since the judgement? How many people speak out against the two companies strategy of dovetailing prices and actually boycott both vendors products? How many people said "fuck this shit, I'm boycotting both these companies and buying a S3 Chrome" (obviously no one since the whole division went to HTC, with SiS/XGI and Matrox faring no better)
Were Intel taught a lesson after litigating Cyrix and C&T out of existence and keeping their foot on AMD's throat ? How many flocked to Motorola based products? (Record revenues year after year says not a lot)
Were AMD taught a lesson after they were caught cheating on benchmarks with fictitious processors and hobbling Intel numbers using out of date software results? How many boycotted AMD as a result? (Answer: Not a lot. Many defended AMD because of the "underdog" status. Win at all cost is acceptable if you're starting with a big enough handicap)
Were Samsung, Toshiba, and LG taught a lesson when they paid settlement after settlement for their part in seven years of LCD price fixing? Where was the outcry, and why is it never mentioned when any of these companies launch new product?
I think we can all agree that anti-trust, patent warfare, and widespread price fixing are more injurious to the consumer that the technical specification of a single SKU, yet none of these previous egregious (and more wide ranging) instances -any many more besides, met with anything other than a metaphorical shrug of the consumers shoulders in the greater scheme.
Consumers ain't care even if a significant proportion are aware of the issue - which is very seldom the case even when it makes the mainstream news including international TV coverage. Fewer still allow morality to intrude upon their quest for the next newest widget....if it did most. if not all the offending companies I mentioned above would have been blown into the weeds by consumer buying power.
With the passage of time the 3.5 GB VRAM limit is going to become an increasing issue. I'm sure some thought that the 1.5 GB that the GTX 580 shipped with was more than enough.
When the 970 was reviewed it offered the promise of 4 GB of VRAM, not 3.5. That means more potential performance in the future. Games were also less likely to bump into the problematic partition back then than they are now and going forward.
Also, the 1.5GB on the GTX580 was enough, in fact I had SLI 470s with 1.25GB. They worked perfectly fine, the memory amount wasn't an issue during their lifespan.
Go ahead peeps. Sell em... I'll happily swipe a couple. :)
1. The vast majority of discrete graphics cards sold are 3GB and lower ( 2GB probably is the norm for mainstream gaming), so unless you see gaming developers, TWIMTBP, and Gaming Evolved moving to quickly alienate HD 6000, HD 7000, GTX 600, and GTX 700 series owners in the next year or so, 3.5GB should be ample for the most part- and where it isn't, it is pretty common practice to lower game image quality. And,
2. "With the passage of time" - say 12 months, the GTX 970 will be at a level that the GTX 670/680/760/770 is at now - EOL'ed and a $200 purchase. Just as GF 104/114 gave way to GK 104, and GK 104 gave way to GM 204, it is near certainty that GP 104/204 will relegate GTX Maxwell to the realms of the mainstream gamer.Well,it was for me four years ago. Are you expecting the GTX 970 to remain a performance segment card for the next 3-4 years?
So for those running SLI, triple SLI, or buying predominantly for an RTS game, I would see the performance drop off as a major disappointment, but is gaming heading in the short term (say the next 12 months) where 3.5+GB of vRAM is the price of entry for the majority games at the majority of game image quality levels for 19x10 (valid for those running at better than 60Hz) and 25x16/1440 gaming?
What matters is the cards market point, a single one at 1440p is still going to be pretty good and serves well at the price point. Its just not going to be as good for as long and it renders the idea of buying 2-3 a little less than optimal since your more likely to hit that 3.5gb limit with that much more power from the extra GPU's.
But I think it will be easier to get 8GB 390X cards for non-crazy prices. AMD seems to facilitate this with their partners.
You can buy Sapphire Vapor-X 8GB R9-290X (and other) GPUs now, and they're not that bad as to price.
8GB NVIDIA based GPUs are not even listed for sale at Newegg.com right now, but I know they exist. (Probably expensive as hell)
I'm not sure that huge amounts of memory will help unless GPU's memory ~bandwidth~ gets a wider highway for data throughput.