"It Won't Happen Again:" NVIDIA CEO Breaks Silence on GTX 970 Controversy

[rtwjunkie]

And also the basis of any company is the communication between every of the work areas

That's just it...as I tried to point out above. Rarely do departments communicate well with each other in a large company. And Marketing gets left out alot because, as @newtekie1 points out, they aren't regarded as the sharpest bunch of people by the braniacs, finance and operations people. The fact that marketing many times does get it right in alot of products accross many different industries is more luck than anything.

 

[Xzibit]

That's just it...as I tried to point out above. Rarely do departments communicate well with each other in a large company. And Marketing gets left out alot because, as @newtekie1 points out, they aren't regarded as the sharpest bunch of people by the braniacs, finance and operations people. The fact that marketing many times does get it right in alot of products accross many different industries is more luck than anything.

Many here put Nvidia in a class of its own on a pedestal yet still somehow akin there communication methods to the 3 stooges for this one.

Hardware - chip bin
Finance - analysis of chip cost with lower ROP and L2 cache and segmented memory to market and other variants of cost of chip to market
Software - driver development to utilize segmented memory
Marketing - market said features to buyers/reviewers and public
Legal - Vetted details and material

It had to makes its way through all these departments without anyone raising a concern over a 2yr or more time period. Not to mention the closer you get to launch window the more each department is to go over material to see if anything is change and double check their work for final release.

Can you spot the sentence about false specs on ROPs and cache? No? I bet the lawyers they where also looking for those two words in the text.

It seems they're busy updating the Reviewers Guide posted by some sites with the new info.

Original

Retro updated

 

[john_]

he would have probably said that...

In his apology letter, he doesn't mention not even once about ROPs, cache and data bus. The 4GB fiasco, as many Nvidia fanboys have proved countless of times, can be justified as 3.5GB+0.5GB=4GB=nothing to see here, everything is OK, it was desighned to be that way. It is a good design!!!!!
But he doesn't touches the other specs because he would either have to lie in our faces in a very ugly and dishonest way, or if he mentions them, the whole letter will be used against Nvidia in the lawsuits against it.

 

[rtwjunkie]

@Xzibit No, I don't put Nvidia in a class of their own or give them a pass on this. I merely tell you what reality is in big corporations. Marketing are most of the time left out of things till the end...and then you have to dumb things down for them so they know what they are selling.

And in real life, departments give lip-service to cooperation. They are like little Middle Ages fiefdoms.

 

[xorbe]

... as many Nvidia fanboys have proved countless of times, can be justified ...

Probably most of the action is entirely from nv fans -- some nv fans are sympathetic, and the other nv fans are pissed off. Probably Radeon users are like, oh is that smoke from the green camp over there, whatever can't hear the fuss over my gpu cooler.

 

[heydan83]

I want to congratulate nvidia for creating loyal consumer that even when they spit hard in their consumer faces they still sucking their balls, nvidia fan boys wtf, you should realize they cheat all the 970 buyers and accept it , its not your fault, and Im not saying you to stop buying nvidia products but at least stop buying this gpu generation, they should realize we have the control over our choices and that they need to stop doing thing like this, what you´re just let them know with all this thing is that no mather if they give you shit, you´re gonna still buying it and defending it like the best product. Im not saying amd is better or a saint maybe they fuck the the things latter and we need to make the same things, they are not making us a favor.

 

[Xzibit]

@Xzibit No, I don't put Nvidia in a class of their own or give them a pass on this. I merely tell you what reality is in big corporations. Marketing are most of the time left out of things till the end...and then you have to dumb things down for them so they know what they are selling.

And in real life, departments give lip-service to cooperation. They are like little Middle Ages fiefdoms.

I disagree. This isn't your entry level job at the local electronic store or Best Buy marketing/sales person.

Your reality and mine differ. I'll direct you to Nvidias Tom Petersen their marketing guy and he doesn't seem to be left out of the loop and most often he'll say he cant talk about details if asked directly or side step the issue to avoid comparisons. Hes by no means clueless and if he is any reflection of the type of people through the department I find it hard to believe the information wasn't extracted or known through-out the development process and gotten to him or his department in some manner. Whether they choose to disclose it was another matter that's been playing out.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I disagree. This isn't your entry level job at the local electronic store or Best Buy marketing/sales person.

Your reality and mine differ. I'll direct you to Nvidias Tom Petersen their marketing guy and he doesn't seem to be left out of the loop and most often he'll say he cant talk about details if asked directly of side step the issue to avoid comparisons. Hes by no means clueless.

Notice I repeatedly said the phrase large corporations. I'm not talking about an electronics store or Best Buy.

I base my reality on having worked at a high level in the Fortune 500 world. Do I think Nvidia was wrong? You bet I do! But you expect way too much of an ideal compared to the way corporations really operate.

I can't talk about details is codespeak for I don't know shit, but I'm not going to admit that on the record.

 

[xfia]

I really thought they would have announced a 970ti or something by now.. might make it as fast as a 980 but I guess a 6 or 8gb 980ti could fix that..

I see a 290x as a perfectly viable option but if I was all nv fanboy I would be like wtf is this jacked up lineup and wait till I had coin for a 980.

the 970's should be collecting dust on the shelves if people want to see a sound lineup.

 

[EarthDog]

In his apology letter, he doesn't mention not even once about ROPs, cache and data bus. The 4GB fiasco, as many Nvidia fanboys have proved countless of times, can be justified as 3.5GB+0.5GB=4GB=nothing to see here, everything is OK, it was desighned to be that way. It is a good design!!!!!
But he doesn't touches the other specs because he would either have to lie in our faces in a very ugly and dishonest way, or if he mentions them, the whole letter will be used against Nvidia in the lawsuits against it.

Hey John... Read what I quoted and replied to please...pay specific attention to the part in parentheses, 'too gimped'.

...or perhaps I'm tired and missing your point. LoL

 

[newtekie1]

So if they would have been explained well, every 970 box would have a legend that reads "3.5 GB + 500!! MB that works weird" who would have purchased something like that?, it would be a 780 with 500 MB extra and no one would buy it.

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....

They had 3 options. Cripple the card further and make it 224-bit 3.5GB or design it the way they did and market it the way they did or design it the way they did and market it differently.

IMO, if they would have marketed the design we got properly, it still would have been just as successful. The reviews would have still been amazing, the performance and price would have been amazing, the power consumption would be amazing because the card in its current form is amazing.

If they would have simply included the explanation they gave, even just this one image, with the reviewers packet they gave to all the reviewers, everything would have been fine and the card would have still sold like crazy because it is a damn good card.

 

[Naito]

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.

I'd argue it was their attempt to gimp the card more, which has lead to this. Neither the GTX 670 nor GTX 780 had a trimmed memory bus, so why bother doing it this time around? For a mid-tier GPU, surely the yields were decent enough? My guess is that Nvidia didn't want a repeat of when the GTX 670 was within 7% of a standard GTX 680; they didn't want to offer too much value.

It's still essentially a 224-bit 3.5GB card as both segments can't be accessed simultaneously, it's just now that it has 512MB cache. Surprised Nvidia didn't make a big fuss over this 'new' method and market it like "Nvidia's new super-dooper-extreme-smart-GeCache" or something.

 

[Sony Xperia S]

I never said I wouldn't buy AMD. I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of saying they won't buy nVidia again because of this situation because AMD has done worse and never even apologized.

When it comes to my purchases, I'll buy the best card for the money, I don't really care who it comes from.

Yes, there is always a risk that the situation will repeat with some of the future cards.

So, I wouldn't buy a new graphics card straight after it is launched.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Yes, there is always a risk that the situation will repeat with some of the future cards.

So, I wouldn't buy a new graphics card straight after it is launched.

That's very good advice that I try to follow all the time. When I do pull the trigger on a "new" card, I wait till about the 6 month time frame. Usually that helps with availability too, as a side benefit.

 

[BiggieShady]

Hardware - chip bin
Finance - analysis of chip cost with lower ROP and L2 cache and segmented memory to market and other variants of cost of chip to market
Software - driver development to utilize segmented memory
Marketing - market said features to buyers/reviewers and public
Legal - Vetted details and material

If they all did it to sell more GPUs, they shot themselves in the foot because their products are selling themselves anyway.
Almost like marketing fucked up while the rest of the company was on deserved collective vacation ... marketing GPU like they're marketing running shoes or box of cereal.
Who's gonna say how healthy this cereal really is? Independent lab that does the analysis months after the new flavour is already on the shelves and the old one is gone. Who's gonna say shoes are as durable as advertised or they last less? Someone would have to argue the pattern of usage and stress done to the product. Too convoluted for a law suit.
That logic doesn't work on GPU specs, as they are painfully aware of it now.
After the vacation they were all praying nobody notices. After it got noticed they were all kicking themselves for not coming out before.
One mistake after another.
Jen-Hsun makes another mistake in the letter: between the lines he is almost telling us we are ungrateful as if we don't know how good that GPU really is for the price - of course we know but it is beside the point. The point is we also know a dishonest practice when we see one. I'm quite pleased with my GTX 970 and not at all with dishonest nvidia practices.
I'd be happy if he said "Marketing guys fucked up and I fired them all. From now on we are marketing GPUs exclusively by showing FCAT graphs and x-ray photos of the die."

 

[newtekie1]

I'd argue it was their attempt to gimp the card more, which has lead to this. Neither the GTX 670 nor GTX 780 had a trimmed memory bus, so why bother doing it this time around? For a mid-tier GPU, surely the yields were decent enough? My guess is that Nvidia didn't want a repeat of when the GTX 670 was within 7% of a standard GTX 680; they didn't want to offer too much value.

It's still essentially a 224-bit 3.5GB card as both segments can't be accessed simultaneously, it's just now that it has 512MB cache. Surprised Nvidia didn't make a big fuss over this 'new' method and market it like "Nvidia's new super-dooper-extreme-smart-GeCache" or something.

My guess is they probably did it because 2MB of L2 cache led to yield problems on the first batch. The GTX 670 only had 512KB of L2, and the GTX780 only has 1.5MB, the 290X only has 1MB. The more cache you put on a chip, the more errors you get, and the lower your yields, especially on early runs.

 

[xorbe]

My guess is they probably did it because 2MB of L2 cache led to yield problems on the first batch. The GTX 670 only had 512KB of L2, and the GTX780 only has 1.5MB, the 290X only has 1MB. The more cache you put on a chip, the more errors you get, and the lower your yields, especially on early runs.

Depends on the number of spare replacement lines available.

 

[Serpent of Darkness]

Technically this is what most of us were speculating from the beginning. If NVIDIA had only disclosed how memory is handled in cut-down Maxwell parts from the start, the backlash wouldn't have grown this big.

I concur.

It is great because at least NV does care about that issue and did something. It is better than just kept silence before. And for me, I don't care about the specs, but some people do. So~ it is hard to deal with this problem, especially in China.

The "I don't care about the specs" comment absolutely made very little sense to a rational person such as myself. Look at it this way from a realistic, down to Earth point of view. This would imply that if NVidia sold you a rock with the Nvidia Logo on top, and it's spec said it was a rock, "but you assumed" before hand it was a graphic card with the premium price tag in this hypothetical situation, you'd buy it. You would definitely buy it because it's NVidia, and you are a loyal, hardcore Nvidia Enthusiast. If you actually did this in real life, what does this say about you or your character as a person and consumer. To make a claim that you wouldn't buy a Graphic Card for it's specs, features, expectations, or performance measures, is highly unrealistic. This also tells a person that the price of a graphic card shouldn't be based on it's specs, it's internal functions, or performance. Thus giving Jen Hsun Hsung justification to pull a fast one on the NV Consumers with the GTX 970.... Wouldn't this be rational?

I believe the appropriate phrase is "Working as intended".....

This isn't Planetside 2 or SOE--oh wait, it's owned by Daybreak Games.

Blizzard has recently been getting a lot better...

I dont think this is a Nvidia vs AMD discuss, this is about consumer vs enterprises, and also all that you said is not "hidden the truth" to the consumer but maybe change the strategy, so even if AMD or any other company that make this kind of thing should be treated the same....

I concur.

So you would deliberately limit yourself to a less capable card in the future (assuming correctly that at some point again Nvidia will have the top performing card again), even if it was cheaper? That doesn't make sense. I would think most logical people would try to buy the best performing card they can, no matter the brand.QUOTE]

Explain to the masses how GTX Titan-Z was a performance gain over 2-way SLI GTX Titan Blacks? What justified the $3,000 dollar price tag for a dual GPU from NVidia? In addition, explain to me how paying $100 to $200 for 10% more FPS (at best) with GTX 780 ti is more reasonable and practical over AMD R9-290x, within context, when both products were first released?

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."

I honestly believe they would have just asked "so the card has 4GBs" and not waste their time understanding what a ROP is while enduring a headache.

Probably most of the action is entirely from nv fans -- some nv fans are sympathetic, and the other nv fans are pissed off. Probably Radeon users are like, oh is that smoke from the green camp over there, whatever can't hear the fuss over my gpu cooler.

Radeon users probably have better things to do with their time. I would say they are probably waiting patiently for the 3rd party benchmarks for R9-390x and 380x to be released in order to make a decision on a purchase. Honestly though, I buy cards from both camps, so I can't honestly speak on behalf of the Red Camp, but I prefer Red over Green. A majority of the Green Camp Consumers are either QQ-ing about it, defending NVidia, or arguing the rights and wrongs of the recent events...

Jen-Hsun makes another mistake in the letter: between the lines he is almost telling us we are ungrateful as if we don't know how good that GPU really is for the price - of course we know but it is beside the point. The point is we also know a dishonest practice when we see one. I'm quite pleased with my GTX 970 and not at all with dishonest nvidia practices.

Shots fired! You better watch what you say. NVidia might file a lawsuit on it's consumers. jk


For my own two cents:

Called it, saw it coming, not happy for NVidia consumers, Hsung is probably writing this response as a reaction to the lawsuits filed by consumers on their product... On a side note, if this is the surprised "Jack in the Box" in the GTX 970, this is giving me second thoughts about investing in a Maxwell-Titan or 2... Probably a smart move would be to wait a few months after release and see what kind of surprises Hsung has for it. Either that, stick to what I have, or move on to R9-390x.

 

[Breit]

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.

 

[rtwjunkie]

@Serpent of Darkness I am confused what your question to me after my quote has to do with what I asked. The point I was making is to exclude one brand forevermore, no matter which brand it is, denies you the best card there is (and I should have added "at your pricepoint").

 

[64K]

You don't rise the level of CEO of a corporation like Nvidia by being unaware of the details of a major release like the GTX 970.

Where I work that would be a fire for being so incompetent as to not communicate with the CEO at this level of operations.

Huang is looking after his yearly bonus and his stock value for now. If/when the shit hits the fan with litigation then we will see some real drama.

 

[AsRock]

Completly agree with this, if they want us to be exicited about "adding aditional weird 1gb" at least they should told us on release date...

Yeah but then people would of bitched about that although nVidia would of not been caught bending the truth.

But would it of turned people away knowing it was not a a card capable of giving access to 4GB how we would of expected it ?. They know the amount of ram on a card influences sales.

I was not in the market as i already had a 4GB video card, how ever if that was not the case i might of avoided the 970 too and just waited for a true 4GB card as some of my games were hitting over the 3GB so would not of settled for less.

I believe they know or some one did at least and kept there mouths shut but as seen as i have not heard anyone getting fired for failing there job i am leaning to they knew after they started selling or soon after and just fastened their seat belts.

@GhostRyder yes some thing(s) stink in that letter that's for sure.

One thing for sure they going in to "cover their asses mode".

 

[Initialised]

Lying about the memory configuration might not happen again.

A flagship card catching fire hasn't happened again.

Paying developers to gimp games when run on AMD hardware hasn't happened again.

Paying resellers to slate AMD's drivers hasn't happened again.

Programming drivers to 'cheat' on popular benchmarks and stress tests hasn't happened again.

Makes you wonder what they'll pull next!

 

[heydan83]

Lying about the memory configuration might not happen again.

A flagship card catching fire hasn't happened again.

Paying developers to gimp games when run on AMD hardware hasn't happened again.

Paying resellers to slate AMD's drivers hasn't happened again.

Programming drivers to 'cheat' on popular benchmarks and stress tests hasn't happened again.

Makes you wonder what they'll pull next!

That´s why we need to stand against corporation and let them know we have the control, but fan boys from either side makes things difficult, they should be more open mind because if they make their "daily purchases" just to support their favorite brand, they probably have a lot of shit in their homes... no offense. This "fight against" which brand is better is intentional created so you can take a side and support no matter what your side, open your eyes guys, they are not making us a favor, I think the best think to do here is to skip this generation from nvidia to let them know we are not gonna support this kind of shit.


Edited: And by the way Im not saying the 970 its a bad card, but it was sell with lies, if you support lies what the companies are gonna say is... if they don´t mind we sell to them with lies once, let´s do it again, and maybe amd will be tented to do the same, so here we the consumers are the ones that get screw

 

[Fluffmeister]

That´s why we need to stand against corporation and let them know we have the control, but fan boys from either side makes things difficult, they should be more open mind because if they make their "daily purchases" just to support their favorite brand, they probably have a lot of shit in their homes... no offense. This "fight against" which brand is better is intentional created so you can take a side and support no matter what your side, open your eyes guys, they are not making us a favor, I think the best think to do here is to skip this generation from nvidia to let them know we are not gonna support this kind of shit.

With millions of cards sold giving record profits and capturing more market share than ever.... I think your boycott might be a little late.