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

[damric]

Maybe Nvidia will give you $10 off your next Titan purchase

 

[xfia]

AMD should make a commercial side by side with 970+290 that shows what happens when you go over 3.5gb.. I could see the ending now!

 

[qubit]

NVIDIA normally make such great graphics cards which is why I've been buying them for years. Yet, they also have a tendency to pull a fast one like this, trashing their reputation and customers' trust in their products, including mine. What's worse is that this isn't the first time we've seen underhand tactics like this result in scandals for them. A good class action win against them for this would be great at helping to keep them honest in the future. It's not gonna happen though, is it?

I never like the idea of a gimped GPU with a bit of it disabled since it reduces performance and unbalances the design and this is a graphic example of exactly why this is bad. This is the sort of reason why I always insist on getting the top GPU in the range. Yeah, it costs me a lot of money, but I also don't have to put up with garbage like this.

 

[Bad Bad Bear]

I purchased 2 of these cards. Not happy.

I have lodged a formal complaint with the ACCC ( I'm in Australia ) Have forwarded my formal complaint to Nvidia and my local retailer Umart. Under Australian consumer law i'm entitled to a refund.

Let's see what eventuates from this.....

 

[damric]

I purchased 2 of these cards. Not happy.

I have lodged a formal complaint with the ACCC ( I'm in Australia ) Have forwarded my formal complaint to Nvidia and my local retailer Umart.

Let's see what eventuates from this.....

Yeah I imagine that SLI would take advantage of more VRAM so I would be pissed too. I never thought my HD 7850s could use the full 2GB but they do in games like Far Cry 3 1080p even with no AA.

 

[silapakorn]

Yeah I imagine that SLI would take advantage of more VRAM so I would be pissed too. I never thought my HD 7850s could use the full 2GB but they do in games like Far Cry 3 1080p even with no AA.

But SLI won't stack VRAM of both cards.

 

[Bad Bad Bear]

Yeah I imagine that SLI would take advantage of more VRAM so I would be pissed too. I never thought my HD 7850s could use the full 2GB but they do in games like Far Cry 3 1080p even with no AA.

The Nvidia moderators just deleted my post off the offical forums.

They are in damage control for sure. Too late now !

 

[AsRock]

I wanted a 4GB card and the 290\X was the only real option, if i had waited i probably would of got a 970 and this finding would not make happy if a performance hit was there or not.

A play a fair few games that take over 3.5GB ram and it would just annoy me just being sold some thing that is not truly what it claims.

 

[damric]

But SLI won't stack VRAM of both cards.

We know this.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I wanted a 4GB card and the 290\X was the only real option, if i had waited i probably would of got a 970 and this finding would not make happy if a performance hit was there or not.

A play a fair few games that take over 3.5GB ram and it would just annoy me just being sold some thing that is not truly what it claims.

Out of interest what are those games? I'm a sucker for creating problems for myself.

 

[ensabrenoir]

....ok all Nvidia has to do is release some awesomesauce that fully activate all of the 970's potential (scapping the ti version) and everyone's happy. Either way I'm gonna buy a nice card really cheap due to crowd hysteria.

 

[Steevo]

Out of interest what are those games? I'm a sucker for creating problems for myself.

It could be modded Skyrim, modded GTA4, modded Farcry 3, Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4 without mods and high res, future games like GTA5 that want more vmem to hold textures.

 

[Xzibit]

....ok all Nvidia has to do is release some awesomesauce that fully activate all of the 970's potential (scapping the ti version) and everyone's happy. Either way I'm gonna buy a nice card really cheap due to crowd hysteria.

Naw, They just have to rename the 970 to 970 SE (Segmented Edition). Marketing gold!!! $$$

Maybe Peter will sell you his.

 

[Justin_you]

Can we bring NVDIA to court because of their false advertisement on the GTX970 spec?
Heck, can we even ask for a refund because we have bought something that not according to the spec?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Most people buy a card off of performance reviews. Not how many ROPSs it has. As a matter of fact I would be willing to bet 99.999999999% of people don't even know WTF a ROP is. But they do know they get 20 FPS more in Battlefield 4.

Most people don't know the difference between GB and GiB either. Seagate got sued for it and lost even though math was clearly on their side.

 

[Ralfies]

Read this on the NVIDIA forum:

Hey,

First, I want you to know that I'm not just a mod, I work for NVIDIA in Santa Clara.

I totally get why so many people are upset. We messed up some of the stats on the reviewer kit and we didn't properly explain the memory architecture. I realize a lot of you guys rely on product reviews to make purchase decisions and we let you down.

It sucks because we're really proud of this thing. The GTX970 is an amazing card and I genuinely believe it's the best card for the money that you can buy. We're working on a driver update that will tune what's allocated where in memory to further improve performance.

Having said that, I understand that this whole experience might have turned you off to the card. If you don't want the card anymore you should return it and get a refund or exchange. If you have any problems getting that done, let me know and I'll do my best to help.

--Peter

 

[Xzibit]

Read this on the NVIDIA forum:
It's good that they're trying to work on a fix through drivers, but the performance of the card isn't the big issue. The fact they lied about the specs is why most folk are upset.

Good catch. Here is the link to his post...

Just so people know its real and your not flamed..

 

[Prima.Vera]

It could be modded Skyrim, modded GTA4, modded Farcry 3, Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4 without mods and high res, future games like GTA5 that want more vmem to hold textures.

Let's relax a little. Those games, even ubber modded, they will only go beyound 4GB of VRAM, only if you play on 4K resolution with 4xMSAA enabled. Which even if you had 1TB of VRAM would still be unplayable due to insufficient horse power

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/unlocked/video-memory-usage-at-4k-uhd-resolutions-idnum146/

 

[xfia]

wow.. he is actually contacting manufacturers for people. they should just hash out a deal that lets you trade up for a 980.

 

[Vario]

Its unfortunate but at the same time, the card does perform well for a lot of what you guys are using them for.

 

[damric]

Ugh this is like finding out the doctor took a little extra off the tip then was needed.

 

[AsRock]

Out of interest what are those games? I'm a sucker for creating problems for myself.

FC4, Watch Dogs and Arma 3 to name a few.

Read this on the NVIDIA forum:

Convenience, cannot imagine them saying that there is a chance of your game when it hits over 3.5GB usage it could take a dump.

EDIT:

Let's relax a little. Those games, even ubber modded, they will only go beyound 4GB of VRAM, only if you play on 4K resolution with 4xMSAA enabled. Which even if you had 1TB of VRAM would still be unplayable due to insufficient horse power

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/unlocked/video-memory-usage-at-4k-uhd-resolutions-idnum146/

You can hit 3.5+GB with them without mods. And i know WD can hit that under 1080P.

 

[sergionography]

So to summarize what we know so far

1. each Maxwell smm can only address 4 pixels per clock meaning even with the rops present they r pretty much useless.
2 Maxwell is having this dilemma because it's the trade off nvidia made when they made Maxwell a more cache dependant design than it is on external bus width.
3. Bus width is meaningless when the gpu computer units can't handle the throughput, it's almost like having 5 lanes open at a movie theater counter but with only 2 employees working

This being said this is more reason to stop looking at theoretical specs and actually measure real time performance. Had it been that memory bandwidth was properly measured it would've been obvious that gtx 970 has lower throughout than a gtx980 despite sharing the same memory width and "rops". 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?" Or should I say too modular? Meaning the parts on the chip are too independent of each other while nvidia has a more focused graphics module containing pretty much everything at the perfect ratio with as little bottlenecks as possible so when they scale up and down the ratio of rendering/throughput remains unchanged across the board, the downside is less flexibility to customize specs which caused this gtx970 dilemma, but the benefit is having consistency and less chance of a "hit or miss"

 

[FordGT90Concept]

wow.. he is actually contacting manufacturers for people. they should just hash out a deal that lets you trade up for a 980.

Would probably cost them more than the class action suit. Last one several years ago was settled for around $18 million if memory serves. That's chump change for NVIDIA. NVIDIA also can't force third party manufactures to do things not in their agreement. The manufacturers have to do that on their own accord and I doubt they'd jump in front of the bus for NVIDIA because they have no reason to.

 

[RCoon]

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.