Graphics Nvidia’s GTX970 has a rather serious memory allocation bug

Nvidia CEO has made a blog post about the 970.
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/02/24/gtx-970/

So would 970 owners have preferred a 3GB card or what you ended up with ?

 

I'm very happy with what I ended up with.

 

All this talk of legal action is just so much crap.

Have a think about your purchase... take your time... research whether you feel the card compromises anything that's important to you. If you're happy with it after that, keep it. If not, return it like many of us have. Then get over it.

I can understand feeling misinformed and annoyed (as I did myself), but seriously.. legal action? What's wrong with some people?

 

They want to keep the card and get a fair chunk of their outlay back as well. Compo for the mental anguish?

Some people astonish me, I expect they are the sorts who plant grapes on the floor in the supermarket and then slip over on them just for the £150 they will get.

 

I'm not keen on the "well 4GB is better than 3" angle. Well of course it is but people still had the right to expect a full 4GB of fully functioning RAM from a card advertised as having 4GB memory.

If only the reality of the situation (including ROPs and L2 cache) was made clear from the beginning then people wouldn't feel as though they've been rubber-dicked. A very silly slip-up.

 

One hundred percent agreement.

 

Yes the solicitors are the only real beneficiaries. However, I don't think companies should be let away scot free for misrepresenting their products, even if it is relatively minor. Also if a fine is paid in full, its not just that loss of that money but the return on that money if invested elsewhere like marketing R&D advertising etc. Plus there's the cost overhead of making €1.50 checks to a few thousand people. There is also people who have handed back their cards, even if they are resold they would still need to be shipped in, refurbed a bit(cleaned upit), repackaged and shipped out again. Possibly selling them at a lower price than they would have gone for the first time around. There's no way Nvidia are not feeling some sort of pain out the back of this. Plus AMD got a few mildly humorous digs in.

We have a sale of goods act here that should protect buyers without the need for suing that pants off of anyone. You go to wherever you bought it, you get your money back and if they refuse, you bring them to the small claims court. The threat of which is usually enough to get vendors moving the right way. I'm not sure what the story is in the States though regarding consumer rights. My guess is they prefer the right to sue.

 

If it didn't perform as well as the reviews (eg. reviewers got un-gimped cards) then I'd be upset. But my 970 performs as well as the review samples (as near as I can tell anyway) so I'm still very happy with GTX970.

Nvidia do have to do better with their descriptions and spec sheets though.

The law suit I think is a bit ridiculous, but you know, first world problems and all that.

 

If the upshot of all this is that going forward Nvidia talk a lot more in-depth about the internal architecture of their GPUs, then this is overall a good thing.

 

A more interesting and detailed lower level view of their silicon perhaps?

 

knowledge in the fact they cant get away with these types of shenanigans again ?

its better they know than try to market the next gen as 8GB that slows to a crawl when you get half way through it

 

Jen-Hsun NVIDIA CEO on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/02/24/gtx-970/

 

A better understanding of how modern GPUs operate that us geeks love to know, less chance of something like this happening again, maybe even some useful insight for the likes of AMD that they could use to narrow the ever widening gap.

What ever the outcome more knowledge and information is almost always a good thing.

 

I'm so glad there's nobody here going "it's actually a 3.5GB card". I do enjoy telling people onm FB off about that though. They're so adament too.

 

I sent mine back and got a 780ti for the same price. All I need are cuda cores so it worked out well.

 

I'm starting to wonder if Nvidia have a long term plan with the so-called "extra 512MB tagged on thing". Maybe they are paving the way for an updated version of -

 

The Memotech ones were better - they didn't crash your '81 because someone opened the door and caused a draught, or if you looked at it funny.



...and they were stackable.

 

Can you explain how it is not, my understanding is if you use the last 500MB it cripples performance, thereby making it effectively a 3.5GB card?