GTX 970 Memory Drama: Plot Thickens, NVIDIA has to Revise Specs

[Xzibit]

The most hilarious thing about all this is that most of the people who are successfully RMA'ing their 970s are then buying a 980 as a replacement from the same retailer. It's not like NVidia is even losing anything out of this, if anything retailers and AIB's are probably going to make more profit from 980 sales now.

The world we live in.

The consumer can't sue Nvidia directly unless its a made by Nvidia since they don't put the memory, which is at issue on the board. The fury will have to be directed at the AiBs, The AiBs are extremely unlikely to sue Nvidia to recoup losses and they will take the financial hit on returns & lawsuits. Nvidia will in return compensate them and probably discount future shipment to make nice. Depending on how this plays out AIBs will probably be more cautious when ordering next go around.


We'll see how long "performance is the only thing that matters" sticks around. Next GPU rumor/release thread -->

 

[ensabrenoir]

.....you know a trade up offer at a discounted price would be an epic Win for everyone. Then sell the 970's as refurbished.

 

[HumanSmoke]

The most hilarious thing about all this is that most of the people who are successfully RMA'ing their 970s are then buying a 980 as a replacement from the same retailer. It's not like NVidia is even losing anything out of this, if anything retailers and AIB's are probably going to make more profit from 980 sales now.
The world we live in.

A very practical demonstration of the power of mindshare. People may (and do) have issues with the company - myself included, but the product and the brand tend to stay in the forefront of the consumers perception...something that Intel has also been built on.

Having said that, how many mirrors must AMD's hierarchy broken, and how many black cats crossed their paths? Every time the competition slips up - this, Intel's Cougar Point SATA bug, Nvidia's 40nm woes (and the list goes on), and AMD are never in a position to capitalize.

 

[MustSeeMelons]

So, they messed up - really want to see how are they going to fix this. If they do nothing and I will be affected - I doubt my next card will be from Nvidia, I have no problem jumping ship. All left to do is grab some popcorn and watch this unravel.

 

[Parn]

A very practical demonstration of the power of mindshare. People may (and do) have issues with the company - myself included, but the product and the brand tend to stay in the forefront of the consumers perception...something that Intel has also been built on.

Having said that, how many mirrors must AMD's hierarchy broken, and how many black cats crossed their paths? Every time the competition slips up - this, Intel's Cougar Point SATA bug, Nvidia's 40nm woes (and the list goes on), and AMD are never in a position to capitalize.

The reason AMD cannot capitalize on their competitors' recent slip ups is they do not have any competitive products on the market. A couple of examples are 290/290X being slower & less efficient than 970/980, Bulldozer/Piledriver being less performant than Sandy/Ivy.

When AMD WAS competitive back in the days of P3 1.13GHz recall & horrendus 1st Gen P4 efficiency, their K7 and K8 based CPU did manage to capitalize on those.

 

[GhostRyder]

The most hilarious thing about all this is that most of the people who are successfully RMA'ing their 970s are then buying a 980 as a replacement from the same retailer. It's not like NVidia is even losing anything out of this, if anything retailers and AIB's are probably going to make more profit from 980 sales now.
The world we live in.

That is the funniest part, its really hard to imagine how some peoples logic works in that sense. But then again one thing happening like that is not a reason to stop buying the components from them all together unless they consistently do it.

The reason AMD cannot capitalize on their competitors' recent slip ups is they do not have any competitive products on the market. A couple of examples are 290/290X being slower & less efficient than 970/980, Bulldozer/Piledriver being less performant than Sandy/Ivy.

When AMD WAS competitive back in the days of P3 1.13GHz recall & horrendus 1st Gen P4 efficiency, their K7 and K8 based CPU did manage to capitalize on those.

The R9 290X is right near the performance of a 980 and an older model card released over a year ago so its no shocker its not as good but especially comparing the higher resolution results they are on par and its better than the 970 in performance numbers while costing about the same/less/slightly more depending on the variant. If both the 980 and 970 were completely blowing away the 290X then that would be a different story but they really are not as even the 780ti is not much weaker than a 980 and bests the 970.

Either way in the end, all this can only make things better for everyone as it just shows people will at least put there foot down (Well at least enough to make a difference). This will help NVidia in the future with their next products not make the same mistakes.

 

[Casecutter]

And last but not least I wanna see more benchmarks on amd cards measuring the effectiveness/efficiency of the memory width vs throughput of gcn and have a more lower level look at architecture in general because I can't help but think amd just goes extreme on certain aspects and slaps random hardware on their chips, idk if anyone noticed but gcn cards have insane variance in efficiency between different chips because the design has become "less modular?"

Not to bust you hump... but you made recall my 8th grade spinster grammar teacher going ballistic

Or should I say too modular?

As it was said by btarunr in this article, "This team (PR) was unaware that with "Maxwell," you could segment components previously thought indivisible, or that you could "partial disable" components." Nvidia (and AMD) if going this route will need to make such "disablements" hopefully more seamless and unnoticeable with upcoming product releases, or best just tell us.

 

[inferKNOX]

I'm really bummed about all this! Not excited about the prospect of stuttering at higher rezos... and I was just on my way to stepping up my monitor to a ULMB, higher rez monitor.

The GTX970 is my first foray to the green team since my 8600GT and it crossed oceans to get from the store to me, so swaps/refunds ain't really an option for me.
Give us free Witcher 3 preorder keys (and some other decent options like Mortal Kombat X / Arkham Knight / Resident Evil for those that want others) and let's call it a day, nVIDIA.

 

[rruff]

When AMD WAS competitive back in the days of P3 1.13GHz recall & horrendus 1st Gen P4 efficiency, their K7 and K8 based CPU did manage to capitalize on those.

AMD isn't competitive because they stopped investing in R&D. 2014 R&D was 58% of 2008. Nvidia now outspends their whole operation, and Intel outspends them many times over. It seems to me that AMD decided to quit competing many years ago, but they are dragging on as long as possible with older architecture. Like when the GTX 960 came out, they bragged that their 3 year old GPUs were still "competitive"! Sure, your top of the line GPUs from 3 years ago that you've been rebadging and dropping the price on, are competitive in FPS/$ at the low-mid range now. Nvidia could do the same thing, just invest in the top range, and rebadge and downgrade everything else, but I'm glad they don't.

I didn't really pay any attention to computers until I needed a new machine and built one last year. I initially looked at only AMD, because they were good last time I checked (2008), and I like the underdog. You could have called me a fan-boy. But as I got into the details I changed my mind.

 

[rruff]

The most hilarious thing about all this is that most of the people who are successfully RMA'ing their 970s are then buying a 980 as a replacement from the same retailer. It's not like NVidia is even losing anything out of this, if anything retailers and AIB's are probably going to make more profit from 980 sales now.

Nvidia is basically selling a 970 and a 980 for the price of a 980 in that case, and possibly getting something for the old 970s. Will we see a flood of used/refurbs on the market soon? Or will Nvidia just destroy them rather than dilute the sales of new 970s? How will Nvidia compensates the EVGAs and Neweggs for refunds that *aren't* upgrades but just cash?

I think Nvidia is losing a chunk of money even in the most ideal scenario.

 

[rruff]

The consumer can't sue Nvidia directly unless its a made by Nvidia since they don't put the memory, which is at issue on the board.

The architecture is the same on all, isn't it? It's Nvidia's design, not something the AIB's control.

 

[RejZoR]

AMD isn't competitive because they stopped investing in R&D. 2014 R&D was 58% of 2008. Nvidia now outspends their whole operation, and Intel outspends them many times over. It seems to me that AMD decided to quit competing many years ago, but they are dragging on as long as possible with older architecture. Like when the GTX 960 came out, they bragged that their 3 year old GPUs were still "competitive"! Sure, your top of the line GPUs from 3 years ago that you've been rebadging and dropping the price on, are competitive in FPS/$ at the low-mid range now. Nvidia could do the same thing, just invest in the top range, and rebadge and downgrade everything else, but I'm glad they don't.

I didn't really pay any attention to computers until I needed a new machine and built one last year. I initially looked at only AMD, because they were good last time I checked (2008), and I like the underdog. You could have called me a fan-boy. But as I got into the details I changed my mind.

Making wasteful R&D spending doesn't necessarily result in superior end products.

 

[rruff]

Making wasteful R&D spending doesn't necessarily result in superior end products.

Of course not, but what does drastically cutting R&D signal? That isn't a move any company would make that intended to be competitive long term. AMD's direct competition is now outspending them >10x. Even if AMD's engineers are more clever than Nvidia's and Intel's, this seriously effects their ability to deliver new products.

Oh... and AMD is currently losing money while Nvidia and Intel are not. How to fix that? Cut "wasteful" R&D even more?

 

[Xzibit]

The architecture is the same on all, isn't it? It's Nvidia's design, not something the AIB's control.

Yes its the same. You can sue both and at least in the US different states have additional consumer laws in addition to Federal laws.

FTC - Truth In Advertising

Nvidia is based in California
California - Truth In Advertising

Lawyers will decide where the money can be squeezed out from the best.

 

[HumanSmoke]

The reason AMD cannot capitalize on their competitors' recent slip ups is they do not have any competitive products on the market. A couple of examples are 290/290X being slower & less efficient than 970/980, Bulldozer/Piledriver being less performant than Sandy/Ivy.
When AMD WAS competitive back in the days of P3 1.13GHz recall & horrendus 1st Gen P4 efficiency, their K7 and K8 based CPU did manage to capitalize on those.

Really?
So what is the excuse when AMD launched the Evergreen series (HD 5000) in September 2009? Between the launching of the HD 5970 (fastest card during virtually its entire lifetime), 5870, 5850 (best bang for buck card of its era), 5770 (best mainstream card of its era), and 5750, and the arrival of Nvidia's Fermi architecture at the end of March 2010, Nvidia fielded nothing newer than an 18-month old GT200 and an almost 2.5 year old G92.....yet AMD's discrete graphics market share actually declined.
It also doesn't explain how AMD's market share is steadily declining while the company still generally being first to market with new graphics architectures (Evergreen launched before Fermi, Southern Islands launched before Kepler).
And K7 and K8? At the height of AMD's competitiveness, the company never accounted for more than 25.3% of the x86 processor market, which was achieved in Q1 2006.

 

[64K]

The reason AMD cannot capitalize on their competitors' recent slip ups is they do not have any competitive products on the market. A couple of examples are 290/290X being slower & less efficient than 970/980

It's not fair to compare the newer Maxwell architecture to the older 290/290X. When AMD releases their R9 380 in a couple of months then we will see a GPU that's probably a good bit faster than the GTX 980.

imo the reason AMD struggles so much is they charged too little for their chips. This is evidenced in the Profit Margin for AMD and Nvidia and Intel.

NVIDIA Corporation
Key stats and ratios
Q4 (Oct '14) 2014
Net profit margin 14.12% 10.65%
Operating margin 17.41% 12.01%
EBITD margin - 18.51%
Return on average assets 10.04% 6.44%
Return on average equity 16.31% 9.48%
Employees 8,808 -
CDP Score - 87 B
http://www.google.com/finance?cid=662925

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Key stats and ratios
Q3 (Sep '14) 2013
Net profit margin 1.19% -1.57%
Operating margin 4.41% 1.92%
EBITD margin - 6.10%
Return on average assets 1.59% -1.99%
Return on average equity 13.16% -15.34%
Employees 10,671 -
CDP Score - 67 C
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AMD&ei=hEjJVMCCFOOWsge1goDYCw

Intel Corporation
Key stats and ratios
Q3 (Sep '14) 2013
Net profit margin 22.79% 18.25%
Operating margin 30.97% 23.09%
EBITD margin - 39.01%
Return on average assets 14.59% 10.89%
Return on average equity 23.07% 17.58%
Employees 105,600 -
CDP Score - 85 B
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:INTC&ei=yEnJVNn3FJOTsgfRnYHYCg

 

[Parn]

Really?
So what is the excuse when AMD launched the Evergreen series (HD 5000) in September 2009? Between the launching of the HD 5970 (fastest card during virtually its entire lifetime), 5870, 5850 (best bang for buck card of its era), 5770 (best mainstream card of its era), and 5750, and the arrival of Nvidia's Fermi architecture at the end of March 2010, Nvidia fielded nothing newer than an 18-month old GT200 and an almost 2.5 year old G92.....yet AMD's discrete graphics market share actually declined.
It also doesn't explain how AMD's market share is steadily declining while the company still generally being first to market with new graphics architectures (Evergreen launched before Fermi, Southern Islands launched before Kepler).
And K7 and K8? At the height of AMD's competitiveness, the company never accounted for more than 25.3% of the x86 processor market, which was achieved in Q1 2006.

Forgot the Fermi delay, my fault.

Well, regarding AMD's market share in x86, their historical 25.3% figure was achieved because of the major success of K7 and K8. Don't forget Q1 2006 was about 6 months before Intel managed to return to dominance with their Core 2 series of CPUs. During the period between P3 Coppermine and Conroe, most enthusiasts and IT literate gamers had Athlon XP, 64, 64 X2, FX or Opeteron in their PCs. And I almost forgot that NV also got a free ride with their nForce chipsets on AMD's success at the time.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Forgot the Fermi delay, my fault.

It isn't an isolated case by any means.

Well, regarding AMD's market share in x86, their historical 25.3% figure was achieved because of the major success of K7 and K8. Don't forget Q1 2006 was about 6 months before Intel managed to return to dominance with their Core 2 series of CPUs.

I'm well aware of the timeline. I referenced this and a fair bit more in a series I wrote a few months back.
The reason of AMD's market share mediocrity is actually fairly simple. The company was founded on a sales/marketing foundation, Intel and Nvidia (and ATI for that matter) were founded on engineering. When you have substantial saleable IP from the get-go and it arrives at market in good shape, the company has a decided advantage (AMD's early years are mostly about making licensed copies of Fairchild TTL chips, Intel ROM/EPROM/SRAM/processors, analog circuits) in mindshare - firstly from the engineers in the companies they deal with, and later the roll-on effect to end users with the establishment of the brand. Once the brand has been established, any rival has to not only deliver better product, but the incumbent market leader also has to fail. Aside from the occasional blip, these two things have never occurred simultaneously to give AMD any advantage. Without the brand and IP basis, the company is playing follow-the-leader, it can't charge as much for products, it's margins are lower (see 64K's post above as example), and with lower revenue it can't take the financial risks on expansion and R&D without a greater risk of compromising the integrity of the company - you then sit at the crux of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Play it safe (Cyrix, Mostek, S3, Matrox, Chips & Technologies etc.) and undergo death by a thousand cuts, or buy IP as a shortcut but incurring debt - as AMD did with the purchases of ATI, NexGen, the DEC licenses etc.

It also doesn't help that AMD promote the "underdog" persona - plenty of people root for the underdog, but a much larger percentage of people want to allied with the dominant brand.

 

[rruff]

Nvidia fielded nothing newer than an 18-month old GT200 and an almost 2.5 year old G92.....yet AMD's discrete graphics market share actually declined.

Your link shows that AMD gained market share that year, while Nvidia declined a lot. Intel was the big winner.

2006 was the year that Nvidia jumped way ahead of ATI/AMD, and they've held about a 60% vs 40% market share lead in discrete graphics since then. Recently though, Nvidia's share has jumped to 72%. 40% to 28% in half a year is a steep decline for AMD. You could say that is a temporary thing and AMD will come on strong after they introduce new cards this year... but that remains to be seen. I fully expect AMD's top card to beat the GTX 980 in performance, but it will be 28nm and likely no more power efficient than previous AMD offerings, which means it will be a beast. Lower down the pecking order I don't expect their new cards to be any more impressive than the R9 285.

 

[xfia]

Your link shows that AMD gained market share that year, while Nvidia declined a lot. Intel was the big winner.

2006 was the year that Nvidia jumped way ahead of ATI/AMD, and they've held about a 60% vs 40% market share lead in discrete graphics since then. Recently though, Nvidia's share has jumped to 72%. 40% to 28% in half a year is a steep decline for AMD. You could say that is a temporary thing and AMD will come on strong after they introduce new cards this year... but that remains to be seen. I fully expect AMD's top card to beat the GTX 980 in performance, but it will be 28mm and likely no more power efficient than previous AMD offerings, which means it will be a beast. Lower down the pecking order I don't expect their new cards to be any more impressive than the R9 285.

all the rumors seem to point at the new radeons having hbm and 20nm cores

 

[HumanSmoke]

Your link shows that AMD gained market share that year, while Nvidia declined a lot. Intel was the big winner.

Look past the graphs (and BTW, the reason Nvidia's overall graphics shipments slipped was because Intel basically killed Nvidia's IGP business with the release of the Nehalem architecture)

Broken down by form factor, AMD gained integrated mobile GPU market share but slipped in discrete in both desktop and mobile. NVIDIA's share of the discrete desktop market grew in the fourth quarter,

or another similar take:

It seems the Radeon HD 5870, HD 5850, HD 5770, HD 5750 and even the almighty HD 5970 were just not enough – or simply just not in enough supply – to tempt punters away from the more widely available 55nm offerings from Nvidia, and that’s even with the temptations of EyeFinity and DX11. Perhaps people don’t care about flashy features as much as AMD thinks they should.

Nvidia's share has jumped to 72%. 40% to 28% in half a year is a steep decline for AMD. You could say that is a temporary thing and AMD will come on strong after they introduce new cards this year... but that remains to be seen.

AMD have released new graphics series before- and as I noted, some had little or no competition from Nvidia....yet the historical data and balance sheet doesn't lie

 

[newtekie1]

Then sell the 970's as refurbished.

Yeah, so I can buy a second on the cheap!

 

[rruff]

all the rumors seem to point at the new radeons having hbm and 20nm cores

This is where I got 28nm:

 

[xfia]

14 to 28 is a huge jump in lithography.. guess we just need to wait for the real deal to hit the market.

 

[Prima.Vera]

...When AMD releases their R9 380 in a couple of months then we will see a GPU that's probably a good bit faster than the GTX 980.

And then, nVidia will release in 1 week time the 980Ti. Same ol' same 'ol.