News Nvidia sued over GeForce GTX 970 specifications

Honestly, who cares how many ROPS their card has??? Standard American protocol of take legal action as a first resort. Stereotype reaffirmed.

 

512GB vram? Wow

 

While I don't totally disagree jrs77, I do think you have over simplified the situation. nVidia are in a continuous and very tight battle with AMD and so they can't simply raise future prices as there is a threshold of what customers will actually pay before opting to go with a competitor. Even a price raise of £20-£30 across the board would push a lot of customers to AMD when performance is considered, not to mention what a very public legal case can do for a reputation. I wouldn't be surprised if in some way this legal case is part funded by AMD...

 

tbh this scandal is a good thing in my eyes as now Nvidia will hopefully be a bit more honest, open and possibly put more effort into creating better products and pushing the boundaries of GPU technology. Sometimes people need a good old kick up the a$se to get the best out of them.

or this could all be glossed over by nvidia's pr machine...

 

I'm still firmly in the camp of "they ****ed up, but it's hardly the worst thing that's happened in the hardware world."

I don't care a jot about Nvidia or AMD frankly, I own shares in neither and will always buy the best card of the moment. But I think the backlash off this whole fiasco has been bordering on insanity in some cases.

Still, let's look at the Steam survey in 6 months time and see how much market share AMD have managed to claw back.

 

EDIT:
nevermind - being dumb

 

Now re-read the article, particularly the final two paragraphs. Nvidia and Gigabyte are being sued by the complainant. Gigabyte suing Nvidia is certainly not mentioned anywhere as far as I can see...

 

No problem, happy to make a small contribution

I know what you mean Gareth, it seems like not long ago that we were boasting about how many MB's we had in our PC's, and our descendants will laugh at our puny GB's and TB's.

 

You aren't a serious gamer until you have 8 x 512YB holographic SSDs in RAID48.

Yours in absent plasma,
S*D

 

The question for the court will be did Nvidia themselves ever release how much ram the card has or its technical specs and the answer is a short no. PR documents used from them may have contained that information but that's not enough for a court case. It's nvidias partners that are in trouble as they did advertise the card as having the specs mensioned.

 

ofc anything sent out is enough for a court case

all it'll take is gigabyte to release what NVidia gave them about the card , which was then sued for the advertising material.

like bumpgate , which NVidia still deny - they`ll be found guilty over this.

 

It's not though harle. In a court of law nvidia themselves would of had to advertise the specs on there actual own website or product distribution. What review sites get is info from the pr department which is not always taken as fact for a court of law purpose.

As for AMD funding a court case what do they get out of it ? The battle was tight 18 months ago not really been a close battle since the 980 and 970 launched. With AMD not releasing a card in ages.

 

This won't make much of a difference to nvidia, sure they messed up but they'll no doubt recoup somehow

 

I'm not sure there is much to recoup.

AMD badly need to get people buying their GPUs what with recent figures showing a 75-25% split, if that trend continues things don't look rosy for them and we need AMD to stay in the graphics market for the benefit of everyone.

 

Oh god this looks so dumb in my european eyes. To be fair I also can't really understand the whole trouble about the ram that maybe-maybe isn't there, or are running at slower speed or maybe dead or buried, but I guess it's because I'm not that much of a hardware junkie

 

Naughty for a mod but awesome

 

Graphics cards are a technical product and sold on their specs.

People pore over specs and technical reviews of these products before making a purchasing decision.

If technical specs are misrepresented it's significant in my eyes.

I was disappointed to see a number of sites I respected give Nvidia a free pass on the issue (Anand). A lot of the benchmarks used to defend the product were the original review benchmarks and not tests designed to highlight the problems that the memory configuration could cause in certain circumstances.

Low memory usage benchmarks focusing on average (or even minimum) frame rates will not highlight the possible issues.

Load up the V Ram, focus on transitions between areas on a large map (where a lot of data is swapped) and then focus on those areas with a frame time analysis - THEN tell me the card performs as well as it should.

I think you could see micro stutter and hitching, and even if it is greatly sporadic you are still not getting the advertised level of performance.

Can I buy it was a mistake in the first instance... maybe.

But they damn well knew afterwards there was an issue and only admitted it when forced to. Gross dishonesty.

I hope they get creamed, are forced to offer full refunds to everyone who wants one and I hope discovery reveals their lies of ommission.

I will be interested to see them admit under oath how long they knew they were misrepresenting their product for before they got their hands caught in the cookie jar.

Maybe I am over excited and should take the tin foil hat off, but I felt that a number of sites were flattered by Nvidia big wigs giving them special attention (look for example at Anand Tech gushing over Nvidia execs calling them personally at the weekend).

They were also wary of damaging the good relationships that allow them to get early access to new cards (which in turn gives them early reviews, which in turn gives them high traffic, which in turn gives them high revenue.)