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
You can say sorry all you want but it does knot change the fact that you false advertised and the value of my 970 has fallen and it stutters like hell at 1440p. 25%+ partial refund or full refund for this bulls***. I don't believe you guys mess up those crucial specs and hope you guys pay for it. Its not ok to do what you did.
Cordially,
Juan
The areas where you need more than even 3GB right now is stupid situations that won't affect 99.99% of people.
And that's very nice.
The fact that the petition has had some people sign 100+ times (and publicize that they did), and requires no proof of card ownership just proves that while some people undoubtedly are affected, Change.org petitions tends to attract a lot of trolls, marketeers, armchair activists, and sceptics all eager to wage some PR war outside the confines of tech blog sites.
I had one, reviewed it, played games (BF4, Grid Autosport, Return to Castle Wolfenstein) at 2560x1440p with no visible issues.
I think the truth lay somewhere in between your apocolyptic account and the its all rosey crowd.
There are plenty of cool older games that still call out to me. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is one of them.