Nvidia responds to GTX 970 memory issue

So, my understanding is:

  • Nvidia sold the 970 as a 4 gb card. In reality, the card has a 3.5 gb pool and a 0.5 gb pool. The 0.5 gb pool has slower-than-dirt bandwidth, literally 1/7 of what the 3.5 gb pool has. Not only that, but the card can't even read both pools at the same time. The card is specifically designed to hold on to the 3.5 gb for as long as possible, and when it finally dips into the 0.5, severe stuttering and awful frame times result. In short, the 0.5 is effectively worthless. The difference between the 970 and an actual 3.5 gb card would be negligible. When games start specifically targeting 4 gb of VRAM for high settings, the 970 will not perform adequately.
  • Nvidia continues to mislead people on the card's official specs page here.
  • Not content with lying by omission, Nvidia had to get in some actual lying as well. The ROPs and L2 Cache size they gave out for months were simply wrong. Nvidia would have us believe that this was a miscommunication between engineering and PR, and that no one at Nvidia noticed the outright lies on the basic stat sheets for their most popular card for months, until they happened to notice right when this issue came under scrutiny.
I find it hard to believe there are still people defending Nvidia. These are outright lies. They deserve to get burned for this, badly.


EDIT: Decided to delete the blurb about an Nvidia officer selling stocks, to focus on the more concrete stuff above.
 
So, my understanding is:

  • Nvidia sold the 970 as a 4 gb card. In reality, the card has a 3.5 gb pool and a 0.5 gb pool. The 0.5 gb pool has slower-than-dirt bandwidth, literally 1/7 of what the 3.5 gb pool has. Not only that, but the card can't even read both pools at the same time. The card is specifically designed to hold on to the 3.5 gb for as long as possible, and when it finally dips into the 0.5, severe stuttering and awful frame times result. In short, the 0.5 is effectively worthless. The difference between the 970 and an actual 3.5 gb card would be negligible. When games start specifically targeting 4 gb of VRAM for high settings, the 970 will not perform adequately.
  • Nvidia continues to mislead people on the card's official specs page here.
  • Not content with lying by omission, Nvidia had to get in some actual lying as well. The ROPs and L2 Cache size they gave out for months were simply wrong. Nvidia would have us believe that this was a miscommunication between engineering and PR, and that no one at Nvidia noticed the outright lies on the basic stat sheets for their most popular card for months, until they happened to notice right when this issue came under scrutiny.
  • David Shannon, the Chief Administrative Officer at Nvidia, happened to dump half a million dollars of stock in Nvidia right before the shit hit the fan. By sheer coincidence.
I find it hard to believe there are still people defending Nvidia. These are outright lies. They deserve to get burned for this, badly.

By "right before the shit hit the fan" do you mean before this was even being discussed on forums, or before Nvidia responded? Holy shit if it's the latter.
 
If this turns out to be true, they either get a good compensation for GTX 970 Users or they can be sure to get a shitton of lawsuits filled against them...
 
So, my understanding is:

  • Nvidia sold the 970 as a 4 gb card. In reality, the card has a 3.5 gb pool and a 0.5 gb pool. The 0.5 gb pool has slower-than-dirt bandwidth, literally 1/7 of what the 3.5 gb pool has. Not only that, but the card can't even read both pools at the same time. The card is specifically designed to hold on to the 3.5 gb for as long as possible, and when it finally dips into the 0.5, severe stuttering and awful frame times result. In short, the 0.5 is effectively worthless. The difference between the 970 and an actual 3.5 gb card would be negligible. When games start specifically targeting 4 gb of VRAM for high settings, the 970 will not perform adequately.
  • Nvidia continues to mislead people on the card's official specs page here.
  • Not content with lying by omission, Nvidia had to get in some actual lying as well. The ROPs and L2 Cache size they gave out for months were simply wrong. Nvidia would have us believe that this was a miscommunication between engineering and PR, and that no one at Nvidia noticed the outright lies on the basic stat sheets for their most popular card for months, until they happened to notice right when this issue came under scrutiny.
  • David Shannon, the Chief Administrative Officer at Nvidia, happened to dump half a million dollars of stock in Nvidia right before the shit hit the fan. By sheer coincidence.
I find it hard to believe there are still people defending Nvidia. These are outright lies. They deserve to get burned for this, badly.

Damn. Only just reading up on this. Almost bought one recently too. The worst thing about this is seeing people defending Nvidia. I mean yes its 0.5gb of VRAM but gamers don't buy cards just to play the games that are out right now that don't fully utilise 4GB VRAM. They buy them as an investment in future proofing their machines for when games inevitably will be using all that VRAM. And that extra 0.5 will become a big deal a few years down the line when you are trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your card.

I'll wait this one out and see what Nvidia end up doing.
 
ok nm, he sold 21.4k shares out of his then-total 266,560 shares.

Gotta at least have plausible deniability on those insider trading charges!

But seriously, I mainly stole this from the Geforce forums thread. There's a guy there saying that several top officers at Nvidia dumped 4 million dollars in shares after the 970's release, after not selling any for a while.

It's a little tenuous, I suppose you're right. Nvidia's outright lies are enough to damn them without any indirect supporting evidence.
 
Problem for me is that it's not like I want a 290 or 290x nor do I want to pay the extra for a 980 nor do I want a 780ti. Ever since the jump to 28nm its been a 3 year padded out comedy show and the 970 is just the last laugh.

Only card that is really any good on paper is the Titan Black in my opinion, that is the true successor to the GTX 580 GF110 with Double Precision. At least AMD haven't been stingy on RAM the whole time though. A 7950 had 3GB of RAM but Nvidia release the 690 with only 2GB and release a $700 780ti with only 3GB almost two years after in late 2013. When the 970 comes along you think oh Nvidia have actually been generous with vram for once but turns out not quite lol, R9 290 is sitting there released a year before with more.
 
Only card that is really any good on paper is the Titan Black in my opinion, that is the true successor to the GTX 580 GF110 with Double Precision...

The £770 I dropped on my Titan back at launch was undeniably ridiculous, but between the new cards that have since released and seemingly little advancement coming from the "980Ti" I've had relatively good value out of my Titan and don't expect to replace it until next year at the earliest.
 
So, my understanding is:

  • Nvidia sold the 970 as a 4 gb card. In reality, the card has a 3.5 gb pool and a 0.5 gb pool. The 0.5 gb pool has slower-than-dirt bandwidth, literally 1/7 of what the 3.5 gb pool has. Not only that, but the card can't even read both pools at the same time. The card is specifically designed to hold on to the 3.5 gb for as long as possible, and when it finally dips into the 0.5, severe stuttering and awful frame times result. In short, the 0.5 is effectively worthless. The difference between the 970 and an actual 3.5 gb card would be negligible. When games start specifically targeting 4 gb of VRAM for high settings, the 970 will not perform adequately.
  • Nvidia continues to mislead people on the card's official specs page here.
  • Not content with lying by omission, Nvidia had to get in some actual lying as well. The ROPs and L2 Cache size they gave out for months were simply wrong. Nvidia would have us believe that this was a miscommunication between engineering and PR, and that no one at Nvidia noticed the outright lies on the basic stat sheets for their most popular card for months, until they happened to notice right when this issue came under scrutiny.
I find it hard to believe there are still people defending Nvidia. These are outright lies. They deserve to get burned for this, badly.


EDIT: Decided to delete the blurb about an Nvidia officer selling stocks, to focus on the more concrete stuff above.

While I agree with you on the 2nd and 3rd points and NVIDIA deserves to be roasted a little for this, I don't get where the false info on actual card perf is being perpetuated. When the card dips into the separate 0.5GB VRAM reserve performance doesn't suddenly tank to shit. Bootski has solid statistics in this very thread repeatedly showing that this isn't the case, and plenty of 970 users (including myself) have shown the same.
 
There's a guy there saying that several top officers at Nvidia dumped 4 million dollars in shares after the 970's release, after not selling any for a while

That's kind of fair enough - you know you have a major innovative product about to launch, you wouldn't sell shares before then because you know/believe that you've got a winning product and that the shares will go upwards once the reviews hit. Then you cash in.

Linking that to somehow knowing there was this issue that would come out later is a bit of a stretch - not impossible, but I don't see anything inherently shady in that, either.
 
Gotta at least have plausible deniability on those insider trading charges!

But seriously, I mainly stole this from the Geforce forums thread. There's a guy there saying that several top officers at Nvidia dumped 4 million dollars in shares after the 970's release, after not selling any for a while.

It's a little tenuous, I suppose you're right. Nvidia's outright lies are enough to damn them without any indirect supporting evidence.

From what I understand, it's very common for executives and other large shareholders to sell off stock at regular intervals. And I'm sure if you're thinking about selling stock, and you know about an upcoming product release which is going to be big, you might hold off on selling.
 
Why in the world didn't Nvidia change ROP and cache on their official site? 970 doesn't have 64 ROPs and 2MB cache but 54 and 1.75. Can't they get sued by this misinformation?
 
While I agree with you on the 2nd and 3rd points and NVIDIA deserves to be roasted a little for this, I don't get where the false info on actual card perf is being perpetuated. When the card dips into the separate 0.5GB VRAM reserve performance doesn't suddenly tank to shit. Bootski has solid statistics in this very thread repeatedly showing that this isn't the case, and plenty of 970 users (including myself) have shown the same.

For now. What happens when Pascal is released and the Nvidia driver team stop optimising for this 3.5GB/0.5GB split memory pool?

Look at how bad Kepler performs in some new games, do you really think that is a hardware difference or just a lack of optimisation from the driver team. Heck perhaps the time required to make this 3.5/0.5 split work correctly is why Kepler performance has dropped in recent titles.

If you live in the EU and do want a refund you should be able to make a claim about false advertising and get your money back should you so choose.

As others have said, if they were upfront about the system they use and had given reviewers the correct specs it would not have made any difference. The performance of the card is still very good for the price and it still has excellent power usage characteristics. It would have enabled users to make an informed decision and they would not be under the gun now. The fact that it is not the sort of thing that would really affect sales leads to be believe it was a legitimate mistake / miscommunication between their internal teams. It does not excuse that it happened though and Nvidia should offer something to users as compensation.
 
I am wondering what other 970 owners would do if offered a full refund (this is for the sake of argument and in no means me thinking they will offer it):

Would you accept a refund?
Would you accept a step up to a 980 (for the sake of argument) ?

I flat out would not accept a 980 step up as I am not throwing more money towards a card. I already made the jump too soon in my eyes so another £100-£150 is definitely a no-go.

I am happy with the card as it performs today but I am now a little concerned as to how it will perform in the future due to this memory revelation. Looking at the bigger picture: would the card be affected by other things before the VRAM pools became a problem? E.g. would a 980 also be suffering along with the 970 when graphics are really pushing ahead?

At the time of buying the card I felt I had jumped too early; I had a 670 2GB and was happy with it (stupid lack of self control). I am willing to tone down settings to get 60fps and it wasn't suffering too badly with the games I was playing. I could easily have waited for the next round of cards without missing the 970 all that much. The 4GB, price and overclocking headroom was a massive draw for me and is what swayed my hand.

It will be very interesting to read articles / benchmarks now this is out in the open.
 
I am wondering what other 970 owners would do if offered a full refund (this is for the sake of argument and in no means me thinking they will offer it):

Would you accept a refund?
Would you accept a step up to a 980 (for the sake of argument) ?

I'd take the refund. Chance of that happening for me is next to zero though, considering I live in a country with no presence of either Nvidia or the card manufacturer (Gigabyte). I'm at the mercy of the store I bought it from.
 
Maybe already posted but a person on reddit did some anecdotal benchmarking with 970s sli: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tu86z/discussion_i_benchmarked_gtx_970s_in_sli_at_1440p/

I feel for you 2x 970 owners if tests like these are accurate. Some games completely tank above 3.5GB :/.

(The user actually shows min/max fps to infer stuttering unlike Nvidia's deceitful averages)

At least the Shadows of Mordor is false, I know cause I tested it and I have a less powerfull PC. Also in my test I fully use the 4GB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrkIF1-e9ds
 
There is no litigation case to be made...only a retailer or AIB can realistically take a claim in court, that obviously depends on if they knew about it or even care.

Also...realistically, AIB's wont bother as they wouldn't want to unsteady their relationship with the people who make them money, same goes for retailers.

So no one is getting anything here, just bad PR for Nvidia that no one will care for in a few months.

Ofcourse a standards orginisation might take stock of this and go after Nvidia, rather doubt this though...the best course of action is to buy AMD instead, if you find this so unfortunate a situation.
 
OK, I have a question. What about those of us that game at 1080p and are not a fan of AA options. I personally rarely use any AA options, So with that in mind. Would I be ok with a GTX 970 or am I still better off getting a GTX 980?
 
I hope they get burned for this.

Even though my 970 G1 performs quite well, I'm still upset about this. I would have purchased a 980 if I knew this information beforehand.
 
I understand why people are choosing to do so, but the number of people who with this news are deciding to not buy a 970 and instead by a much more expensive 980 is kind of making my head spin. I'm sure Nvidia couldn't be more glad.
 
I was not happy with the idea of getting the 980 but honestly with this info its a not a hard choice.

Yeah I know, but I ordered the 970 again after I saw how much a 980 costs. even if we where lied about the specs I just can't pay 50% more for 15% more performance right now which sucks. :/
 
I understand why people are choosing to do so, but the number of people who with this news are deciding to not buy a 970 and instead by a much more expensive 980 is kind of making my head spin. I'm sure Nvidia couldn't be more glad.

Most of the time humans make decisions emotionally and not rationally, especially purchase decisions. Blame evolution.
 
Yeah I know, but I ordered the 970 again after I saw how much a 980 costs. even if we where lied about the specs I just can't pay 50% more for 15% more performance right now which sucks. :/
Sorry to bother you, But I have a question you might be able to answer. With all of the talk about the RAM issue with the GTX 970, It has me thinking about if I should just spend the little extra go for a GTX 980. But I seen a lot of the RAM issues pop with resolutions higher than 1920x1080. My gaming monitor and TV are both 1080p with a refresh rate of 60htz. I am personally not a fan of Anti-aliasing, I honestly never have it turned on, Unless the game has a preset of 1X. With all of that said, Would a GTX 970 still be a good purchase for me or am I better off getting a GTX 980? Thank you.
 
Sorry to bother you, But I have a question you might be able to answer. With all of the talk about the RAM issue with the GTX 970, It has me thinking about if I should just spend the little extra go for a GTX 980. But I seen a lot of the RAM issues pop with resolutions higher than 1920x1080. My gaming monitor and TV are both 1080p with a refresh rate of 60htz. I am personally not a fan of Anti-aliasing, I honestly never have it turned on, Unless the game has a preset of 1X. With all of that said, Would a GTX 970 still be a good purchase for me or am I better off getting a GTX 980? Thank you.

the 970 is more than enough for 1080p gaming.

If you foresee yourself getting a 4K monitor, downsampling from 4K resolutions on your 1080p monitor, or plan on getting an Oculus Rift, it may be a more difficult call.
 
Sorry to bother you, But I have a question you might be able to answer. With all of the talk about the RAM issue with the GTX 970, It has me thinking about if I should just spend the little extra go for a GTX 980. But I seen a lot of the RAM issues pop with resolutions higher than 1920x1080. My gaming monitor and TV are both 1080p with a refresh rate of 60htz. I am personally not a fan of Anti-aliasing, I honestly never have it turned on, Unless the game has a preset of 1X. With all of that said, Would a GTX 970 still be a good purchase for me or am I better off getting a GTX 980? Thank you.

At 1080p the gtx 970 is still your best purchase for the dollar. Unless you're gaming at 1440p (on new resource thirsty games) or dual monitors. The people hit hardest by this news are those running sli setups. A single 970 for 1080p gaming will still last quite a while but will run into trouble a little bit sooner than most thought due to the limitations on the last 0.5GB.
 
It doesn't really matter why anyone bought the card.

It was advertised as something that it isn't & that's not OK. There's no legitimate way to turn the blame onto the consumer here.


NVIDIA misled about exactly what this card is & they should definitely have to compensate people who bought them on the promise that wasn't delivered.


I've got 2x970s in SLI and I really hope I can upgrade them to 980s for a reduced price, get a partial refund or similar.

I fully expect we'll just get a gratis game or something, but it's not REALLY good enough.

Yup, in the same case. Especially when they advertise 4K for SLI owners this feels quite shady.
 
the 970 is more than enough for 1080p gaming.

If you foresee yourself getting a 4K monitor, downsampling from 4K resolutions on your 1080p monitor, or plan on getting an Oculus Rift, it may be a more difficult call.

At 1080p the gtx 970 is still your best purchase for the dollar. Unless you're gaming at 1440p (on new resource thirsty games) or dual monitors. The people hit hardest by this news are those running sli setups. A single 970 for 1080p gaming will still last quite a while but will run into trouble a little bit sooner than most thought due to the limitations on the last 0.5GB.


Thank you to both of you, I am not currently planning on going 1440p or 4K yet, I just want to run the games with max settings and high FPS without AA settings. So this would be the card to do that? Also I noticed most games, ok one so far had a texture pack that needed a 6GB card. Besides that game, Am I going to have an issues using higher the console quality texture options?
 
I understand why people are choosing to do so, but the number of people who with this news are deciding to not buy a 970 and instead by a much more expensive 980 is kind of making my head spin. I'm sure Nvidia couldn't be more glad.

There isnt much choice really. the current AMD offerings are in the same performance ballpark but they use a lot more power. They could wait for the r9-3xx series I guess.
 
I am wondering what other 970 owners would do if offered a full refund (this is for the sake of argument and in no means me thinking they will offer it):

Would you accept a refund?
Would you accept a step up to a 980 (for the sake of argument) ?

I flat out would not accept a 980 step up as I am not throwing more money towards a card. I already made the jump too soon in my eyes so another £100-£150 is definitely a no-go.

I am happy with the card as it performs today but I am now a little concerned as to how it will perform in the future due to this memory revelation. Looking at the bigger picture: would the card be affected by other things before the VRAM pools became a problem? E.g. would a 980 also be suffering along with the 970 when graphics are really pushing ahead?

At the time of buying the card I felt I had jumped too early; I had a 670 2GB and was happy with it (stupid lack of self control). I am willing to tone down settings to get 60fps and it wasn't suffering too badly with the games I was playing. I could easily have waited for the next round of cards without missing the 970 all that much. The 4GB, price and overclocking headroom was a massive draw for me and is what swayed my hand.

It will be very interesting to read articles / benchmarks now this is out in the open.
Exact same situation here, wish I just stayed on my 670 2GB. Just upgraded since it seemed like a reasonable jump at the time and I wanted 4GB of vram for next gen, and now I don't even get that.
 
Just received one of these as a gift. Considering I was still running a 7850, I'll take the increase but it is a bit disappointing. :/
 
Just cancelled my GTX970 and I'm probably going to buy the 980 instead :/

You're weird, guys. Why didn't you go for the 980 in the first place? Both 970 and 980 will hit their shading performance limits before they'll hit the memory limits.

Also - there is still no actual evidence that dual pools of 970 have any discernible effect on the games beyond loosing some performance - which is already shown in all 970 benchmarks since the day it was launched.
 
I hope they get burned for this.

Even though my 970 G1 performs quite well, I'm still upset about this. I would have purchased a 980 if I knew this information beforehand.
I wouldn't have. A 980 costs a whopping 70% more for about 20% more performance. And an extra 0.5GB....

I mean, fair enough if you would have, but I'd still have gotten a 970 even if I knew about this beforehand. Its still a powerful ass card.

Granted, I wasn't planning on keeping this card for years and years, though.
 
The people hit hardest by this news are those running sli setups.

Yes..I feel like I've been hit hard playing BF4, Crysis 2 & 3, FC4, at very high or ultra settings @4k and 'only' getting a lovely smooth 50-60fps.


Strangely enough, since all this broke, my frame rates haven't dropped...one bit.
 
I understand why people are choosing to do so, but the number of people who with this news are deciding to not buy a 970 and instead by a much more expensive 980 is kind of making my head spin. I'm sure Nvidia couldn't be more glad.

The sad reality of a marketplace where the 2nd place competitor has fallen so far behind. Nvidia and Intel get to price according to what people are willing to pay instead having to directly compete with their main competitor.
 
Yes..I feel like I've been hit hard playing BF4, Crysis 2 & 3, FC4, at very high or ultra settings @4k and 'only' getting a lovely smooth 50-60fps.


Strangely enough, since all this broke, my frame rates haven't dropped...one bit.
Geez.. its the future proofing we're talking about. I was just thinking. I wonder what effect this will have on the resale value of used gtx 970s.. I'm guessing Nvidia screwing this up is going to cost the upgrade itch people a bit of money.
 
Yes..I feel like I've been hit hard playing BF4, Crysis 2 & 3, FC4, at very high or ultra settings @4k and 'only' getting a lovely smooth 50-60fps.

Strangely enough, since all this broke, my frame rates haven't dropped...one bit.

Thank goodness all games coming out for the next couple years will have the same recommended specs. That would suck for future games to require more.
 
Yes..I feel like I've been hit hard playing BF4, Crysis 2 & 3, FC4, at very high or ultra settings @4k and 'only' getting a lovely smooth 50-60fps.

Strangely enough, since all this broke, my frame rates haven't dropped...one bit.

Others have already commented on that. The problem here (I wrote this in another thread, too) is that the performance drops are unpredictable. If performance relevant data, which needs to be accessed a lot during a single frame rendering, is stored in the final 512 MB, the performance will tank. Even though you have good performance most of the time (which is great and I'm happy for you), sometimes you won't and you can't avoid that.

Imagine for example: 3,5GB of textures are stored in an optimal way. Now the coder wants to do a small rigid body (or Lara Croft hair) simulation on gpu. Data will be allocated in the remaining 512MB. If it requires a little bit more bandwidth, it would require longer to calculate than 1/60s and your framerates would suffer, because the frame needs to wait for the calculation to finish. Nvidia cannot anticipate this situation.

In my opinion the best solution for everybody here would really be to simply ask nvidia to disable the remaining 512MB (as an option, so users can choose!) and get guaranteed performance. In the other thread it was mentioned that both pools cannot be accessed concurrently, therefore there is really no need to keep the 512MB, as you don't want them to be used ever.

TL;DR: The GTX970 3,5GB would be a much better card than the current GTX970 4GB with crippled bandwidth.
 
My brother just bought a GTX 970 for his first custom built gaming PC...

He's only going to be using it to play 1080p games though, so he shouldn't be too effected by this, but it's still a bit disconcerting knowing that it may not last as long as he would've liked. =/
 
My brother just bought a GTX 970 for his first custom built gaming PC...

He's only going to be using it to play 1080p games though, so he shouldn't be too effected by this, but it's still a bit disconcerting knowing that it may not last as long as he would've liked. =/
Let him play something new like Dying Light. High textures results in VRAM usage up to 4GB.

I didn't really care for the whole thing, till today. I can't play Dying Light maxed out with 2 GTX970 because of the VRAM problem.
 
All this talk of future proofing makes me chuckle. You know what you are getting into with PC gaming. If you expected a £270 GFX card to be future-proof you are deluding yourself. Just play the games available NOW and worry about the future when it arrives. Hell, if I get a couple of years out of mine, I'd consider it money well spent, and I've already had a fair chunk of that, enjoying games for what they are, not losing my hair running benchmarks, worrying about what might be.
 
Let him play something new like Dying Light. High textures results in VRAM usage up to 4GB.

I didn't really care for the whole thing, till today. I can't play Dying Light maxed out with 2 GTX970 because of the VRAM problem.
Well he'll mostly be using it for exclusives or older games, since he'll be buying most new multiplats on his PS4 to play together with friends.

That really sucks though. Do a lot of recent/upcoming PC games use all 4GB of VRAM?
 
Well he'll mostly be using it for exclusives or older games, since he'll be buying most new multiplats on his PS4 to play together with friends.

That really sucks though. Do a lot of recent/upcoming PC games use all 4GB of VRAM?
I think we'll strart seeing more doing so
 
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