Nvidia Faces Suit Over GTX970 Performance Claims 161
According to this story at PC World, Nvidia was hit with a class action lawsuit Thursday that claims it misled customers about the capabilities of the GTX 970, which was released in September.
Nvidia markets the chip as having 4GB of performance-boosting video RAM, but some users have complained the chip falters after using 3.5GB of that allocation.
The lawsuit says the remaining half gigabyte runs 80 percent slower than it's supposed to. That can cause images to stutter on a high resolution screen and some games to perform poorly, the suit says.
It was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California and names as defendants Nvidia and Giga-Byte Technology, which sells the GTX 970 in graphics cards.
Nvidia declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday and Giga-Byte couldn't immediately be reached.
Seagate (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't look very different from when Seagate was taken to court over mislabeling hard-drives sizes, using 1000000 bytes for a MB instead of the commonly used 1048576 bytes for a MB.
I fully expect they will lose this, lose some PR metric, and start to implement the age old skill of asterisks on packages and adverts.
Re:Seagate (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seagate (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia?
Lawyers?
They'll make a few million, and all the GTX970 owners will get a $5 discount coupon off their next Nvidia card.
Re:Seagate (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.
There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"
Re:Seagate (Score:5, Interesting)
nvidia did much more egregious deceptive marketing well over a decade ago in the GeForce4 MX [techreport.com], which didn't have programmable shaders like the GeForce3 series. I actually learned about it because the company where I worked was fooled into buying one of these for my computer, when the program I was using required one of the higher-spec devices. That misleading advertising actually did real financial damage, at least in my company's case, both in lost productivity and in replacing the hardware.
That really bothered me, and I started buying ATI cards for a time after that, since I didn't want to reward a company for underhanded behavior. I only started buying nvidia again quite a few years after that since the ATI drivers were giving me more trouble than they were worth.
This is not quite as bad, but it definitely smells a bit the same. A "mistake", really? I'm betting they wouldn't have made a "mistake" in underestimating their card's performance. Marketing at it's finest.
Re:Seagate (Score:4, Insightful)
nvidia did much more egregious deceptive marketing well over a decade ago in the GeForce4 MX,
Really? I had one of those cards, what was wrong with it?
I actually learned about it because the company where I worked was fooled into buying one of these for my computer, when the program I was using required one of the higher-spec devices.
Fooled? How?
That misleading advertising actually did real financial damage,
No. The idiot chump who made the purchasing decision and bought the card even though it did not have programmable shaders and didn't say it had programmable shaders is the one who did the company real financial damage. The GF4MX never claimed to have programmable shaders. Are you that idiot? Or did the GF4MX just touch you somewhere? Can you show us on this picture of the internet where nVidia touched you?
I owned a GF4MX because it was a fantastic value. As a budget gamer, it was the best buy at the time if you weren't playing games which demanded shaders. As a corporate user who needed shader support, you'd have to be an asshole to buy the GF4MX anyway, because it was a budget card. You wouldn't buy a card like that to do work, unless you just needed a basic GPU.
This may shock you, but you are going to have to do your homework no matter what you buy. The model numbers on cars are equally worthless. Let me guess, your business also bought a one ton truck and discovered after ignoring the weight allowances that it couldn't actually haul one ton in the bed legally, and therefore Ford stole your money and kicked you in the nuts because you were too dumb to read and understand the specs, and that the GVWR would only allow you 3/4 of a ton of actual hauling capacity in your one ton truck.
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Has Slashdot somehow attracted edgy Youtube commenters now? It's so dull to read useless diatribes full of personal attacks and passive-aggressive dick waving. I'd hope we're a little more intelligent here. Why do people even post this garbage? Do they think it makes them "cool", or maybe that it'll impress someone? Maybe it's just a cry for attention from a lonely 12 year old I guess...
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No, that dude has been on Slashdot for longer than any 12 year old has been alive. You can tell from both his uid and the terrible car analogy.
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his posts are the disgusting type that make me feel negative about life and oh by the way hate slashdot.
it's likely he's created multiple accounts in multiple browsers and cycles them so that he has mod points ready to go any time he wants them
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Ah, beowulf cluster and CowboyNeal jokes...those were the days.
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Ah, beowulf cluster and CowboyNeal jokes...those were the days.
Natalie Portman's Hot Grits poured on the GNAA. Those were truly classier times.
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As to the GF4MX. Wasn't it pretty obvious if you did ANY research that it wasn't the same as a GF4? Or am I being too logical and reasonable again?
Yep, I know. My main point was just to show some Slashdot discussion from the old times. I tried to find something close to the GF4MX and the discussion was what I found with a quick search.
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nvidia did much more egregious deceptive marketing well over a decade ago in the GeForce4 MX,
Really? I had one of those cards, what was wrong with it?
No. The idiot chump who made the purchasing decision and bought the card even though it did not have programmable shaders and didn't say it had programmable shaders is the one who did the company real financial damage. The GF4MX never claimed to have programmable shaders. Are you that idiot? Or did the GF4MX just touch you somewhere? Can you show us on this picture of the internet where nVidia touched you?
The GeForce 3 was a new processor core supporting DX8. The Geforce 4 line was marketed as an updated GF3 core supporting DX9, but Nvidia sold warmed over Geforce 2 cores supporting only DX7 labeled as Geforce 4 without making the switch clear - in fact burying any disclosure of what that meant in terms of performance and compatibility.
At launch at retail from what I remember, the posters and pamphlets touted the GF4 cores supporting DX9. The box for the GF4 MX cards didn't contain any information outside th
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Nope... the GF4MX was a terrible value, considerably worse than the Geforce 3,
it was a lot cheaper than the GF3, especially if you bought an OEM card.
Let's also not forget the considerable lack of honesty in marketing a product as the Geforce4
They didn't. It was the 4MX. It did in fact have some of the bits of the GF4 slapped onto its GF2 roots.
To compare with your truck analogy it would be like Ford bringing an "F450" to market which actually has a lower towing capacity than the F350 (note, I realize that Ford already has an F450, but the analogy still stands).
People get confused that diesels have less hauling capacity than gassers because of the heavy motor all the time, but nobody sues over it.
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the company where I worked was fooled into buying one of these for my computer, when the program I was using required one of the higher-spec devices. That misleading advertising actually did real financial damage
What exactly did they lie about? It sounds like you needed a card with support for new graphics APIs, and it turned out it didn't have that support, correct? Surely that's the fault of the person who placed the order.
Creating a 'GeForce 4' that's actually less capable than a 'GeForce 3' is at worst a bit scummy (at worse.... it's not totally unreasonable to have a low-end GF4 be outperformed by a high-end GF3, imo). I wouldn't go as far as to say it was misleading advertising, unless they really lied on the
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Why would they lose? The cards have 4GiB of RAM. They never guaranteed that performance would be sustained after the 3.5GiB mark.
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Pretty sad
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It does work. There's 4GB of RAM. It's fully usable. It's just slower. Just like my laptop.
So are you saying I should be suing Toshiba because the top 2GB of RAM in my laptop is half the speed of the bottom 4GB?
And note that the actual frame-rate tests I've seen show only a few percent difference, because you'll rarely be accessing data in that upper 512MB. You need artificial tests to make it run drastically slower.
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So are you saying I should be suing Toshiba because the top 2GB of RAM in my laptop is half the speed of the bottom 4GB?
If it's not because the memory is of two different types, yes. That's exactly what is being said. If the system says it supports up to however much memory, and the memory specs don't make it clear that over a certain point performance will degrade, then yes you should sue, if they won't take a return.
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It does work. There's 4GB of RAM. It's fully usable. It's just slower.
Imagine if you bought an 8-pack of cola cans and 1 of those cans was always a bit shittier tasting than the others. Would you accept the explanation "there's 8 cans of cola, they are fully drinkable".
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I'm pretty sure you'd be looking at suing if you were refused your money back or a replacement that functioned as you expected on a car sold to you with 4 wheels where after you received it, one turned out to be 80% smaller than all the others.
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> The short story is that Maxtor was the first to have a Marketing department take advantage of that, knowing full well most people see MB and assume powers of 2.
Then most people are stupid. Stop trying to bastardize the SI prefixes for your hard drive edge case, in every other measure Mega is a base 10 power, not base 2.
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Bit and byte are not SI units. Let me know when I can buy computers with 17.179869184 GBytes of RAM.
Take up your argument with JEDEC.
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Bzzzzt, try again, IEC 80000-13.
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IEC is not JEDEC and JEDEC does not explicitly support the IEC definitions.
When they start using metric prefixes in IC part numbers and organization, then I will reconsider.
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Except that MB is a metric term that was co-opted in computing for no good reason (base 2 calculation rounding), and correcting it makes sense.
1 million bits is a megabit. 1 million bytes is a megabyte.
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So systems advertised with 17.179869184 GBytes of RAM should be appearing any time now. That will be a lot simpler than labeling them 16 GBytes and no doubt appeal to marketing.
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Actually they have 16 GiB of RAM; its a number very close to a billion but based on powers of 2 instead of 10.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
Words have meanings, and so do prefixes; the metric numbering system was usurped (stupidly) to mean something it didn't mean.
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I am aware of the IEC's revision and believe it will lead to further confusion. Simply regarding bits, bytes, words, and whatnot as non-SI units with special meanings for k, M, and G would have been enough. It only got confusing with telecommunication standards requiring conversion.
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Why was Seagate sued for using the correct amount? The SI prefixes are older then the use of them in computing. "Mega" was standardized in 1960.
Now as to why they were abused to mean powers of 2: I can understand that. However that abuse does not mean you should sue the guys that get it right.
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It's only confusing if you bend over backwards to make it confusing. Given speed X, the last 0.5 Gig runs at X - (X*.8) That is, speed minus 80% of speed or as one might say in English, 80% slower.
So yes, in this case it runs at 20% of the speed of the other 3.5 GB.
What other interpretation did you have in mind?
Re:80% Slower? (Score:4, Informative)
80% slower = 20% of the speed = 5 times slower (takes 5 times as long to do something) = 500% slower.
OR
80% slower = takes 80% longer to do something = 1/1.8 times slower = 0.55555555555 times slower = 44% slower.
See, ambiguous. There are 2 well defined definitions of 80% slower: gets 80% less done per unit time, OR takes 80% longer to get the same thing done. They have very different meanings. For one of them, 100% slower = gets nothing done ever, and the other means it takes takes twice as long (you have to wait an extra 100% of the original time). The same applies to 100% faster: one version means infinatly fast, and the other means twice as fast.
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You're playing fast and loose with the terminology and adding extra steps that were never suggested to confuse yourself. KISS and it will all make sense.
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There are plenty of examples of both usages of slower, showing that it is ambiguous across popular usage. For example, there's a whole 800% slower [youtube.com] "genre" on Youtube where songs are played at 1/8 of their original speed. When popular usage is so sloppy, it's better to avoid the phrasing altogether in favor of something precise instead.
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So we take X - 800%X = -7X, hmmm I say to myself, spinning it backwards at 7x normal speed seems unlikely. They must not be using percentages right.
Note how the absurdity of the statement when interpreted the standard way tips me off that something is wrong. Doesn't that make more sense than pretending to be baffled when someone uses it correctly?
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Maybe he works for Nvidia and that's how this mess got started?
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You may be on to something here!
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No, its an ambiguous word and I've complained about it in life on numerous occasions.
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I'm not the one who used the phrase in the first place. I'm just the one who somehow managed to understand a perfectly common phrase that really doesn't have a lot of ambiguity to it.
Perhaps if more people would take a moment to explain 'bi-weekly' (fortnightly), there wouldn't be so much confusion there either.
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The last 0.5 GB is only connected by one memory lane, while the first 3.5 GB has many more of them.
It's worse than just 0.5 GB of slow memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Memory performance between the two segments (3.5 + 0.5 GB) of memory works in an XOR manner so that accessing the slow segment prevents access to the 3.5 GB segment. Also, the whole memory access issue is a distraction from the fact that Nvidia originally advertised that the 970 had 64 ROPs (when it really has 56) and that it has 2 MB of L2 cache (when it really has 1.75 MB).
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I'm not a GPU designer.
But in the case of the ROP .. .. supposedly doesn't matter (at all? Or for the number of pixels only?) because as the URL above says it:
(should I Google it? ROP = Raster Operator and here comes the URL: http://techreport.com/review/2... [techreport.com])
"In an even crazier reality, that limit isn't even the primary fill rate constraint in this product, since the GTX 970's shader arrays can only send 52 pixels per clock onto the crossbar."
If it's the case that 56 is more than what is needed due to limi
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One wonders if disabling that last 500MB of RAM would in fact improve performance.
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I purchased the card based on performance reviews and the price point of the 980. The 970 seemed to offer performance my wallet could justify spending the money on vs not dropping the cash for the latest and greatest card.
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The 1st 3.5 GB operates on the 7/8 wide bus (224 bits); this is the same as on any other reduced core count card. However, nvidia added a new "bypass" bus inside the GPU permit 2 memory controllers to be driven by a single L2 cache module. This avoids the ne
So... (Score:1, Troll)
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What part of businesses cheating customers is a first world problem?
Or is that shit okay elsewhere?
probably won't go anywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they will find it real difficult to prove that Nvidia was intentionally (Ntentionally?) misleading people with the advertisements. Nvidia's response and explanation for what happened seemed pretty detailed and made sense to me. These kind of lawsuits actually piss me off a little anyway, because the lawyers are the only ones who really benefit. Even if Nvidia is made to compensate people who purchased the card, it's unlikely going to amount to any more than a few dollars for each person. Except the lawyers, who will get their huge fees regardless.
Do the people who file these things actually think they are somehow taking the company to task or making the world a better place? They certainly can't be doing it for actual money or greed.
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I don't get your problem with the people suing. They were promised X for Y dollars. They only got a fraction of X. That Nvidia didn't do that intentionally means it wasn't fraud (and that's good). That still leaves them owing their customers 100% of X or compensation for only giving them a fraction of X.
Specs like that are generally not interpreted as being on a best effort basis.
As for the rest, yes it is an injustice that the lawyers will get millions and the actual plaintiffs will get nearly worthless co
Re:probably won't go anywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get your problem with the people suing. They were promised X for Y dollars. They only got a fraction of X.
They were promised 4GB. They got 4GB. Complaining that 0.5GB of that runs slow is like complaining that 2GB of the 6GB in my laptop runs at half the speed of the other 4GB.
The only valid complaint they have is that Nvidia said it had 64 ROPs when it only has 56. That's not really something worth a lawsuit, when, as I understand it, the chip isn't capable of generating pixels fast enough to make use of 64.
As I said above, the only people who will really benefit from this are lawyers.
Re:probably won't go anywhere (Score:5, Informative)
They were also promised a specific performance at the same time as the 4GB of memory. They aren't getting it. At the least, Nvidia should have offered a driver that avoids the last half Gig of ram and a partial refund.
This isn't a car where it is well understood that top speed and maximum fuel efficiency don't happen at the same time. This is an unusual situation for a graphics card that substantially degrades it's performance, and so, it's value.
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This isn't a car where it is well understood that top speed and maximum fuel efficiency don't (sic) happen at the same time. This is an unusual situation for a graphics card that substantially degrades it's (sic) performance, and so, it's (sic) value.
Legally, that might make all the difference in the world as a false claim by nVidia would be entirely different from a false assumption by the consumer. For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed. Just because that's been commonly the case with GPUs - though in the aftermath of this several instances of non-uniform memory has been proven - it doesn't make it a defect that it's not. Unless you have some kind of generic fitness for purpose clause,
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Nvidia has already admitted that it's own people were confused by the claims. That says a lot about who the courts might blame.
As for computers in general, I find that when I do access all of the memory (HPC), those accesses happen at the rated speed.
As for the rest, an anti-emetic might keep you from being shoved in a locker.
Re:probably won't go anywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed.
No, no it isn't, and it hasn't been since the Amiga.
There is no PC where it is common to have different speeds of memory.
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For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed.
No, no it isn't, and it hasn't been since the Amiga.
There is no PC where it is common to have different speeds of memory.
Maybe not on desktops, but it definitely exists in servers, where it's referred to as NUMA [wikipedia.org].
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Maybe someday you'll learn about registers, L1, L2, L3 caches, bus expansion memory, virtual memory, etc.
I owned an IBM PC-1 with 384kB of RAM on an 8-bit ISA card along with a RTC and maybe a serial port or something, so I'm quite familiar with the idea. But that was a long, long time ago. Maybe someday you'll learn that when people say "memory", by default they mean main memory.
I also owned several Amigas, and still have an A1200 in fact. Now THAT is an architecture where it was normal to have memory running at different speeds. Hell, you could actually put SRAM on Amigas.
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Seems to me that, technically, this is very similar to having a 256MB DIMM and a 128MB DIMM put into a system with 2 memory channels
Is this a troll? A 128MB DIMM, all else equal, has the same number of chips as a 256MB DIMM. Each chip has half the capacity, so for the same bus width, you get half the memory. Of course, there are DIMMs which only have a couple of chips on them, but those chips have wider buses than the normal ones. You can install just one DIMM at a time into modern PCs, because a DIMM is two SIMMs on one board. And also a stupid name, because a SIMM was a single module, not a single memory chip, and a DIMM is also a sin
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They were not promised any performance numbers. They were promised something below the 980... which it is.
Anything else comes from reviews - including thorough performance testing. The card didn't magically become slower than it was for those reviews.
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You might not realize this but most of those review numbers came right from Nvidia's marketing department.
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Are you claiming not a single site ran their typical suite of benchmarks, instead getting their data from Nvidia?
Because that is the most asinine conspiracy theory of the month. Sure, there are lazy sites that don't actually review stuff, but that doesn't apply to all.
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They certainly didn't do testing before they got a test unit. Then, once they did, I'm guessing they ran a very standard test suite that probably doesn't try to stress memory capacity.
I'm quite sure the numbers in Nvidia ads and on the box didn't come from review site tests.
And yes, I'm sure some sites actually tested, but I'll bet more than we would like just grabbed the numbers from Nvidia.
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No graphics card has "XX FPS minimum in GameY" on the box or in any ad. Only vague promises and concrete data like clocks and RAM.
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But in this case, the clocks and RAM data is wrong.
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Clocks are not wrong and the whole 4GB of RAM are accessible.
If you want to complain about something, at least find something that was really misrepresented.
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You mean like that the last 0.5 GB runs slower (you know, the clocks is wrong) and creates bus contention? Or how it can only do 7 accesses in parallel, not 8? Even Nvidia admits they gave out incorrect information, how is it you are so sure they didn't?
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No, just the throughput which is a function of clock * bus width.
You can have all the clock rate in the world, but still get shit performance on a 32-bit bus, which is exactly the problem.
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it's the same clock. The problem is bus width. 7/8ths of the memory is on an 7x wider bus than that last 1/8th. Thus, the performance loss.
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In the end I have a card I thought I paid a decent amount for, for the performance I receive. Even after all this has come to light I'm still happy with my purchase.
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However, it happens under a condition that is within the spec of the card. Had the card been specced as 3.5 GB and it just happened to be able to go to 4GB (outside of spec), all bets about performance would reasonably be off.
If specifications are to mean something they must be met. They COULD have qualified the specs by saying 4 GB max ram and then explicitly state that the performance figures happen at 3.5 GB and they would be fine.
Allowing the fast and loose approach distorts the market and shafts the be
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What's really funny, is that if they would have marketed it as a 3.5GB card, and then people started to figure out that there was really 4GB of RAM on there, they probably would have gotten better sales of the part through the hardware hack community trying to figure out how to "unlock" it.
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Correct they were promised 4GB. They were also promised 224 GB/sec memory bandiwdth (not only on the first 3.5GB). Do you really want to allow companies to misrepresent their products?
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications
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(Don't ever ask anyone in tech support what they honestly think about the marketing people.)
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The other effect is that Nvidia gets a nice fat punitive settlement levied against them, which acts as a deterrent from doing this crap again. I think that's the point.
This will be settled (Score:4, Insightful)
When the firm representing the class bills up a few million, the defendant agrees to paying the fees and to mail all class members a $5 discount coupon or some useless download.
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Good luck with that... (Score:5, Interesting)
...and I say that as an owner of 2x970s. Every benchmark you see is as advertised. It actually has 4GB of RAM that can be reached at the advertised speed, just not all 4GB of it simultaneously. Nobody's come up with a "smoking gun" benchmark where framerates tank for gaming. The 780 Ti with 3GB RAM beats it in pretty much benchmarks - even at 3840x2160 in SLI - so it seems that the last 512MB don't make much of a difference at all, at least not in today's games. They'd better find some compelling examples of actual harm, because I still haven't seen it. I might be biased though, since I'm kinda hoping there won't be.
What is certain though is that nVidia screwed up big, because this really would have been a footnote if they'd just informed about it. It would have been known as a 4GB card that's really 3.5GB-ish. When I bought it I thought it had the same memory subsystem as the GTX980, like two GTX970 in SLI with 2x13 = 26/16ths the shaders will always perform better. Now that might not be true in a 3.5-4GB scenario but it's a maybe kinda thing. I've long since learned that you buy computers for what you want today, tomorrow.... maybe something entirely new comes around and you want to replace it anyway. Not that I see these two being out of date for a while, seriously kicking ass at 2x145W GPU + 88W CPU it's ~500W ass-kicking system.
No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just a bunch of whiny asshats who care about specs on paper rather than real world performance. The 970 is damn amazing. It makes the 980 nothing more than a overpriced luxury toy, and I say that as a 980 owner. Its performance is within 10-15% of a 980s and it is like half the price, what's not to like?
Also as for the memory thing this is actually a BONUS from nVidia, not a cripple. What I mean is in the past, they'd have just stuck 3.5GB on it and called it good. Then, if something needed more than 3.5GB, you go to system memory which is very slow 16GB/sec if you are running 16x PCIe 3 and much slower if you run less (like if you are doing SLI on a consumer board with PCIe 2 it would be 4GB/sec). However with this, you get another 512MB of RAM that is faster. Not as fast as the primary RAM, but much faster than hitting the system RAM over the PCIe bus. It won't perform as well as a 980 in those high memory situations, but it would perform better than if it just didn't have it at all.
I agree they should have noted it better, but really who gives a shit in reality? The 970 is the best "step down" card they've ever made compared to the highest end. Amazing value for the money and real world benchmarks from somewhere like HardOCP show it kills at modern games.
It's also funny how they act like nVidia did this to "harm" people for some business reason. If anything, they'd want to make the 970 look worse so people would be more likely to spend the near double to get a 980. However instead they made the 970 as close to the 980 as they could and I'm sure that ate in to the 980 market.
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Informative)
It's also funny how they act like nVidia did this to "harm" people for some business reason. If anything, they'd want to make the 970 look worse so people would be more likely to spend the near double to get a 980. However instead they made the 970 as close to the 980 as they could and I'm sure that ate in to the 980 market.
That is just silly. Nvidia benefit by making the product look better to highend gamers so they don't choose the competitions card. You act like Nvidia is the only maker of highend gaming cards. It is actually worse than a 3.5GB card as at least with 3.5GB gamers and drivers by default understand they are going to have a performance impact if beyond that is accessed and hence will only use it when necessary, with 500MB of slow memory by default the games had no understanding they would be crippling game performance by accessing that part of the memory. The 970 is a nice card, but Nvidia did blatantly mislead purchasers and while the issue won't even impact more than 90% of owners it is still an issue and one that could have been avoided by Nvidia being honest.
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That extra 0.5Gb is not only worthless, it actually IS detrimental! The card still advertises a unified 4GB of memory space to the application. There is no mechanism to advertise that this remaining 0.5Gb is 5x slower with XOR contention against the lower 3.5Gb. As a result, the underlying application treats the entire address space uniformly (i.e. if you were playing this game with a 3.5Gb card, it would EITHER always be consistently bad (since stuff would be moving across PCI-E), or the game would auto
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I wonder if it would be possible to completely disable the "problematic" 0.5GB of RAM by a patch or driver update.
Then it would really just be a 3.5GB card and avoid those issues.
I'm sure that just the idea that whatever stuttering is experienced at any given game *might* be due to the RAM issue is enough to drive some of those gamers mad.
So if it could be disabled (optionally of course) it would be good I think.
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Today I'll never see that problematic
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If "real world performance" cannot at least meet "specs on paper", then it is false advertising.
Yes, in this case it's an extremely little thing compared to the overall card, but corporations are trying their damnedest to slip in/out whatever they can at the expense of the consumer. So long as they can get away with it (which includes paying a fine/lawsuit that costs less than the profit from their misleadin
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The 970 is a fantastic card, I also have one and have never seen issues. HOWEVER, it definitely can't access all 4GB at the same speed. it can access the first 3.5GB at full speed, and the second 500mb at only a fraction of that full speed and it can't access both at the same time, hence when the second 500mb is in use it actually impacts the performance of the entire 4GB. For me there is no affect, but there are those with 4k displays and multi card configs that this definitely impacts, the effect is very
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Just to make sure on the later part.
Does any graphics card enable you to access memory from various parts at the same time?
If not how is that part relevant?
Maybe one can read from multiple of the other segments / chips at the same time what do I know.
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The problem is that GPUs usually have a uniform memory layout. If your GPU advertises 4 GiB of RAM then all 4 GiB of it behave in pretty much the same way. Accessing one part of the memory does not significatly affect accesses to other parts. Thus it's unnecessary to take special care in how to structure your memory handling; you just use whatever's there.
The 970, as I und
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Deep pockets (Score:1)
there's a whole industry devoted to suing "deep pockets". I once attended a presentation on this that explained to lawyers which companies they should target, how long they have to wait until they should gather plaintiffs for a class action law suit and how lucrative this is. There are even people financing these suits as an investment. I'm still not sure what is more unethical, lawyers leeching off of companies or companies lying to customers.
Oh boy! I can't wait! (Score:1)
I can't wait for my postcard-check in the mail for $0.21 explaining how the lawfirm got $34,500,000 of the $35,000,000 settlement and the remaining $500,000 gets divided among all GTX970 owners.
CUDA and OpenCL (Score:1)
It does matter for CUDA and Opencl performance. So even though games might work around it (except on the mentioned high resolutions), it simply runs into problems if you are going to use it for computing on >3.5GB.
SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer (Score:2, Insightful)
SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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No. The reason it affects the 970 is because it's missing some of the hardware that's in the 980.
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