NVidia GTX970 - Memory Allocation Bug Found

[Charezon]

I take NO credit for this article, it is a copy and paste from LazyGamer @  http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/nvidias-gtx970-has-a-rather-serious-memory-allocation-bug/ purely to bring information to the masses.

 

 

NVidia’s GTX 970 is the current price-to-performance darling, offering incredible visual for incredible value. It seems, however, that it’s harbouring a dark secret. It’s a 4GB card, but it looks like a significant chunk of that VRAM doesn’t work.

 

According to a number of rather angry people on Reddit, Overlock and the Guru3D forums who’ve noticed their shiny, powerful GTX 970’s come to a screeching halt when maxing out their cards. Clever people, using VRAM benchmarking software, have discovered that when the last 500`700MB of VRAM gets accessed, memory performance drops significantly. Some users have even found that their cards go belly up when hitting 3GB.

 

 

The issue doesn’t seem to affect the more expensive, more powerful 980 – so it’s not a Maxwell fault, but rather one specific to the 970. DRAM bandwidth drops from a peak of over 150GB/s, right down to 19.88 GB/s.

 

“Going beyond 3.5GB vram usage in games like Hitman Absolution, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare severely degrades the performance, as if the last 512mb is actually being swapped from the RAM,” says Reddit user

nanogenesis

in a thread on the

subject.

 

The problems seems to be widespread – and Nvidia’s admitted that problem affects every single 970 (to varying degrees). They’re looking in to the issue – but unless it’s something that can be resolved via driver or firmware update, a recall may be on the cards.

 

“We are still looking into this and will have an update as soon as possible,”

said NVidia community liaison ManuelG on the GeForce forums.

 

We asked our resident cabbage, Alessandro – who owns a GTX 970 – to test, and he was hit with the same results. You can download the benchmark to try it yourself, here.  If you require the extra library to run the benchmark, you can get it here.

 

 

While the card is still a performance champ, it makes it hard to recommend right now, as it’ll never reach its full potential. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket and you’re aching to buy a new card, you may just prefer to opt for the 980, which isn’t affected by this. Or you could, loathe as I am to say it, wait to see what AMD has up its sleeve.

[WereCat]

Wow... that is prety major bug. I hope it will be resolved just by firmware update otherwise NVIDIA may be in trouble if it is hardware failure.

[Samsterstorm]

Ouch, maybe they will release a patch or those samsung memory chips are not as good they make them out to be

[UltraNeonGaming]

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU I just got a STRIX 970 YESTERDAY!

If they fix this... Will the 970 be even more powerful than it already is?!?

[UltraNeonGaming]

I'm pretty sure Nvidia already knows about this bug, because they can't just make a new GPU without doing some seriously independent testing of every single thing on the GPU.

If nvidia knows about this and a fix has still not been realeased I'm starting to think it's to do with hardware, I don't think so though because it could be a firmware bug in the memory controller.

[Geekazoid]

Oh crap! This suckity suckity sucks.

Goodbye NVIDIA!

Hello AMD!

[dragoon20005]

Oh crap! This suckity suckity sucks.

Goodbye NVIDIA!

Hello AMD!

290X will be a good GPU to get now that its cheaper and the 290X can access all 4GB of the 512Bit memory

[Geekazoid]

290X will be a good GPU to get now that its cheaper and the 290X can access all 4GB of the 512Bit memory

Yeah, I'm actually excited as to what AMD will release with their R 300 series of GPUs.

I never thought that I'd break my NVIDIA Fanboyism. JK

[Geekazoid]

BTW, are you filling in as SAV1OUR whilst he's gone?

@dragoon20005

[dragoon20005]

BTW, are you filling in as SAV1OUR whilst he's gone?

@dragoon20005

duh   :ph34r:  

[Geekazoid]

duh   :ph34r:

LOL. I miss that guy. He's good value.

[The Crazed Child]

He's good value.

Yeah he was cheap and performed quite well

[Tedster]

Let's hope that Linus and Slick mention this on the WAN show.

 

I guess I'm lucky I'm stuck with older hardware.

[LarsReviews]

 

@Nvidia You better fix this ASAP!!!!!!!

[Icecube26]

no wonder the 970 cost only around 350... cuz its 4gb on paper but 3gb in reality... lmao...fail of the year...

[Briggsy]

this reminds me of the gtx 660. the 2GB version was fine until you went past 1.5GB memory usage, and then the bandwidth plummeted because there was a separate memory controller for the last 512MB, which meant much less bandwidth. the 3GB version did not have the extra memory controller, and all 3GB of ram ran at full bandwidth. Some of us that intentionally bought the 3GB 660 were fully aware of this glaring issue with the 2GB 660.

 

If this is the same crap with the 970, where the last 512MB of ram is tacked on, and Nvidia knowingly did this to make the card cheaper and hoped it would go unnoticed... that would be a dick move. If its just a firmware problem that they thought would be fixed before launch but wasn't, that's more understandable. 

[Dnoble24]

I knew there was something seriously wrong with my SLI 970's when i could barely out perform the valley scores of my 770 SLI. 

 

:unsure:  I'm not very happy about this. Hopefully they can fix this with a patch. Since they must have known before hand, if they can't fix it, i want my money back. 

[xAcid9]

I knew there was something seriously wrong with my SLI 970's when i could barely out perform the valley scores of my 770 SLI. 

 

:unsure:  I'm not very happy about this. Hopefully they can fix this with a patch. Since they must have known before hand, if they can't fix it, i want my money back. 

 

I don't think Valley will use >3.5GB of VRAM.

[jessicametal]

I was literally coming in to post this article. Good job on the ninja-ing, OP.  :lol: 
I'm thinking this is a firmware issue that can be fixed with a patch. If it's actually a hardware issue, I'm probably gonna be a sad panda though. I REALLY wanted to get a new 970. 

[Forerunner]

just tested it I have the same issue with my 970.

 

Hope Linus covers this in the WAN show.

[DevanArianne]

Just tested it with mine. The last 900 MB of DRAM does it (Dropping from 150 Gb/s to 66.96then 22.35 all the way down to 8.44 Gb/s), and the L2 take sit even harder. ( 432 Gb/s down to 8.21 at the last 900 mb.) 

[Astorrin]

Mine use 2,4GB of VRAM in Vally extreme, maybe another problem you got. @Dnoble24

[Icecube26]

if this is going to be a hardware issue  i can not imagine how much rage  its going to produce.....

[Cakefish]

Results of my GTX 980M 4GB, which doesn't seem to be impacted by this bug - hopefully a software issue only.

 

GTX 980M 4GB, stock clocks, 344.75 driver:

 

[jessicametal]

The initial rumors I'm hearing is that this is a firmware issue, Nvidia is more than aware of it, and they are working as fast as possible to get a patch out for it.


Good because otherwise I was probably just gonna buy an R9 290X otherwise.