Do you think that Nvidia should recall 970's? (and Nvidia's response)

[dredded_one]

People do seem to forget that the memory on GTX 970 also can never reach the advertised 224 GB/s. Its absolute maximum, when only the 3.5 part is accessed, is 196 GB/s. GTX 970 might have the same amount of VRAM. It might work around the fact that the 0.5 part of memory is very slow too, by means of smart memory allocation. But no amount of spin can twist the simple fact - GTX 970 was advertised as card that has the same amount and peak bandwith as GTX 980. And while amount is technically the same, the peak bandwith is a lie.

 

You can debate about the ROP issue, although it is still a lie, and arguments "if nobody told you, you would still be happy" are only appropriate in kindergarden. But memory is undebatable. GTX 970 can never reach peak 224 GB/s as advertised, the highest it can do is 196 GB/s.

 

Yet somehow it went from a "OMG Uber value!" to "garbage" in one day? I don't buy it. It's the same speed as it was when everyone looked at the benchmarks.

[Opask]

But did they?

 

The only place they put this info, was a note to reviewers. They never advertised it on their boxes, on youtube, on their website. Anyone could have looked into it or asked them, but nobody did. 

 

And now that someone did, nvidia is being totally forthcoming and sending people to do interviews about it.

I honestly feel bad for nvidia right now they are loosing costumers over this. They are trying to sort it out but people are just twisting their statements to make them look bad.

[SirGrant]

How could they possibly do a recall with so many manufacturers? I'm OK with an apology and possibly a gift card. Actually, I'm OK right now, very happy with the tech. But I wouldn't complain about some gravy with their crow...

[Nikolithebear]

Yeah i think we should get a free game or 50 bucks rebate for each card if we bought multiple.  

[eelnico09]

I'd rather have a free game or some shit like that, than a replacement. Mainly because i'm in south america and i bought it with amazon global. I'm not returning it or anything like that, card works fine, i doubt i'll need more than 3.5gb playing at 1080p. And i upgraded from a 7950, i would've upgraded anyways if it had 3.5gb, les cache and less ROPS.

 

Also the card technically has 4gb of memory...

[d3sl91]

The reviewers advertised the card based on the info they received from the manufacturer, Reviewers showcased the card listing it's specs and how it performs using the spec sheet NVIDIA GAVE THEM. The reviewers did NVIDIA's advertising for them!

Right.

 

Which means nothing in this case. Because it was a buyer's choice to believe a reviewer on the internet and not go to nvidia directly. 

 

If anything we should be pissed at Hardware review sites for not doing an in-depth job. But of course we wont do that, because thats ridiculous. Same as burning nvidia at the stake for apologizing for a typo and explaining themselves.

 

I've worked in huge companies and 2/3 man companies. Mis-communication happens....ALOT. Typos happen... all the time. And what happens when someone points them out? We access the damage and see what needs to be done. in this case, the product people received is exactly what they were sold. a GTX970. It performs exactly how nvidia claimed it would. 

[Opask]

What statements have been twisted?

They have said that it still has 4 gigs it just utilizes it in two different segments. We have people saying that becasue of this only 3.5gigs are actually useful. Nvidia also said that when it does utilize all the memory it is at 224gb/s. People still believe that its slower than that. 

[Nico123473]

FREE 970'S FOR EVREYONE!!!!!! YAY!!!!!

[BatJoe]

FREE 970'S FOR EVREYONE!!!!!! YAY!!!!!

 

[oskarstankovic]

As someone who owns a 970, I don't really care.

I'm pretty sure everyone who bought a 970 looked at benchmarks first, then MABYE looked at ROPs. But who cares how many ROPs or L2 cache it's using? Performance is the end result we care about and ROPs and L2 cache affect it. So if you saw the performance of the card and were satisfied enough to buy one then obviously you're ok with less ROPs and cache. 

 

I don't care if the 970 has 1 ROP and 1kb of L2 cache or if it runs off fairy dust as long as it performs as it should/does. Did I see special Nvidia videos with the 970 running BF4 4K Ultra 120fps then get mine and see that it can't do that? NO.

That's take a step back and look at something. The Price/Performance follows the normal upgrade trend, that's good. Now look at the 970 vs 980 which cost almost $200 more for about 15% more performance...That's not much more for a whole lot more money as is usual for x70 to x80 jump. So what I'm seeing is a bunch of babies who want a 980 specs for the price of a 970. The 980 is barely better than a 970 and costs so much more yet you're whining about the 970 WHEN YOU WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW IT WAS AN "ISSUE" UNLESS SOMEONE POSTED IT.

People are freaking out for basically no reason.

The ONLY issue I have is I would like the full 4GB or VRAM, I'm not super salty though as it's only 512MB out of 4096MB and 99% of people with this card won't hit the 3.5GB mark so it's not a huge issue.

 

You're right, the performance is the result of the building quality, software, hardware, etc.

 

Im conformed If they give us a game or something, or maybe pay some difference for the 980's I don't know how much but if its 200 dollars cheaper than the 980 then difference can be like 80 dollars.

 

I got a GTX 970 G1 Gaming scince the half of December and Im pretty conformed with the performance, but knowing this in some future I'll prorably goes with r9 300's series.

 

NVIDIA should take some responsability and let us pay the difference or something untill the differences that they said is not too much, they as a honorable company should do something...

 

And I have the same issue than you  :wacko:

[chopdok]

Yet somehow it went from a "OMG Uber value!" to "garbage" in one day? I don't buy it. It's the same speed as it was when everyone looked at the benchmarks.

Part of the value of the GPU comes from longevity. The reason why its such a great value now is because its only 15% slower than GTX 980. But not only that - its the fact that it has the same memory bandwith, and the derived expectation of the card having the same performance difference in future titles that will require more bandwith to run. The current GTX 970 keeps up just fine with GTX 980. But in future, that will stop happening the moment games will require more peak bandwith than 196 GB/s. At that point the gap between GTX 980 and GTX 970 will widen drastically. Hence, its not as good value vs 980 as people and reviewers considered, because again, they took into account the same memory bandwith and ROP count, and expected the 15% gap to remain constant throughout the lifespan of the GPU.

 

Doesnt mean its a bad card. It just means that the current amazing value of the card will not stay that way, and if you compare the cards in 2 years, GTX 980 will have a huge performance advantage over 970. Because once the VRAM bandwith is not enough, performance goes to shit. And now, we know that on GTX 970 it will happen sooner than on 980.

 

Basically, GTX 970 was downgraded from "great" to "the usual 340$ card" - because its amazing performance vs GTX 980 is now know to be temporary, and only relies on nVidia optimising the drivers to account for its specifics - which is actually unheard of in high-end cards segment. Your 340$ is great performance is totally up to nVidia to maintain. Once they decide they rather not spend money on GTX 970 drivers, be prepared for perormance to take a nosedive. While GTX 980's performance will remain stable.

 

On the other hand - now the 200$ difference between GTX 970 and 980 makes perfect sense, and I would argue that in the long run, GTX 980 is absolute superior value. At least it wont turn into 3.5 GB card after 2 years due to lack of driver optimisation.

[Briggsy]

They have said that it still has 4 gigs it just utilizes it in two different segments. We have people saying that becasue of this only 3.5gigs are actually useful. Nvidia also said that when it does utilize all the memory it is at 224gb/s. People still believe that its slower than that. 

 

If you read Anandtech's write up about it, both memory segments cannot be accessed inside of the same cycle, so 224GB/s is in this case just a number.

[mutedcurmudgeon]

In my opinion I still think the 970 is a great card, and that they will probably give a game or something like that.

But back to the card, its still a good one, everyone thought it was some sort of godsend when it came out, and it had the problem then. And I know that what they did was pretty terrible by marketing it wrong and saying it has 4GB of ram when it really has 3.5 or whatever. But again, its still a great card, if I sold you a car and told you a ferrari and then a couple months later someone said it was actually a corrola or something. I know its dumb or fanboyish or whatever, but really, the card still kicks ass so don't worry about that crap. 

[TVwazhere]

I bought the EVGA FTW edition which came with a free game already. I'm divided personally. In some ways there should be a recall, but in other ways, using the car example, if you bought a car that can go 100kmh, you have to also asses how often you go 100kmh. I dont believe I use the full extent of my card (playing mostly 1080p games) so personally i dont think ill use every byte of ram 3.5gb gives me anyways. But other people who would use it all kinda deserve it for $350-400USD

[Whorax]

They have said that it still has 4 gigs it just utilizes it in two different segments. We have people saying that becasue of this only 3.5gigs are actually useful. Nvidia also said that when it does utilize all the memory it is at 224gb/s. People still believe that its slower than that. 

But only 3.5GB are actually useful.

[d3sl91]

So you're saying that Reviews are irrelevant in this case because the consumer didn't know any better?? Now you may know this already but we're on a forum that is founded by a Tech Review/Tips YouTube channel...

 

 

You don't trust someone like Linus to tell what the GTX 970 is in a video about said video card??? What?

 

1. Why did you comment twice?

 

2. Sure. Unless he did his own testing using all available tools and had a sitdown with an Nvidia engineer, nope, I don't expect Linus to know what exactly is going on in a card.

 

What I do expect, is for him to benchmark it, and tell me if its good on the games I want to play. Which he did, and did very well. So, I would buy it.

 

But then to say that I should get a refund because Linus said the card had xx specs is ridiculous. If I was so concerned about that spec, i would have contacted nvidia directly (seeing as they don't advertise that spec, so theres no way to know without asking anyway). 

[chopdok]

By the way, the manufacturing costs for GTX 970 and GTX 980 boards are the same for most partners. Same chip, same PCB layout (if talking about reference, but most custom PCB are also same for 970 and 980) same VRAM chips. Pure manufacturing costs of GTX 970 die are actually higher than GTX 980, since GTX 970 is GTX 980 that went through additional manufacturing stage of disabling part of the chip, after binning. Basically, as funny as it sounds, GTX 970 is more expensive to manufacture than 980. They obviously price the GTX 980 above 970 - and thats how they make back the money they spend on research and development.

[SteveGrabowski]

Part of the value of the GPU comes from longevity. The reason why its such a great value now is because its only 15% slower than GTX 980. But not only that - its the fact that it has the same memory bandwith, and the derived expectation of the card having the same performance difference in future titles that will require more bandwith to run. The current GTX 970 keeps up just fine with GTX 980. But in future, that will stop happening the moment games will require more peak bandwith than 196 GB/s. At that point the gap between GTX 980 and GTX 970 will widen drastically. Hence, its not as good value vs 980 as people and reviewers considered, because again, they took into account the same memory bandwith and ROP count, and expected the 15% gap to remain constant throughout the lifespan of the GPU.

 

Doesnt mean its a bad card. It just means that the current amazing value of the card will not stay that way, and if you compare the cards in 2 years, GTX 980 will have a huge performance advantage over 970. Because once the VRAM bandwith is not enough, performance goes to shit. And now, we know that on GTX 970 it will happen sooner than on 980.

 

Basically, GTX 970 was downgraded from "great" to "the usual 340$ card" - because its amazing performance vs GTX 980 is now know to be temporary, and only relies on nVidia optimising the drivers to account for its specifics - which is actually unheard of in high-end cards segment. Your 340$ is great performance is totally up to nVidia to maintain. Once they decide they rather not spend money on GTX 970 drivers, be prepared for perormance to take a nosedive. While GTX 980's performance will remain stable.

 

On the other hand - now the 200$ difference between GTX 970 and 980 makes perfect sense, and I would argue that in the long run, GTX 980 is absolute superior value. At least it wont turn into 3.5 GB card after 2 years due to lack of driver optimisation.

 

What pisses me off is I could have actually had the card that would degrade gracefully with time for the same price: namely, a Sapphire Tri-X R9 290x. Now I'm stuck with a card with a shorter shelf life when future proofing was a huge part of why I got the GTX 970. If all I cared about was now I wouldn't have spent $340 on a GPU.

[Ex14]

1) no it does not matter, because as you can see the 780ti had only 48 and it still performed just as well.

 

2) so you got a GPU that has 3.5GB "usable" instead of 4GB ok well unless youre running ultra HD textures at 1440p or 4k it doesnt matter, and if you are they you probably own a titan black or 780ti or 980, not a 970

 

3) is your fps in games good? yes it is. ok then its fine as it is.

 

4) That's not how the world works. If the 970 is 15% slower than a 980, the next year it will STILL be 15% slower than a 980. Its not like the 970 magically loses performance while the 980 doesnt lol

 

5) youre complaining about 3.5GB when nvidia optimises drivers to work on GPUs down to 1GB of vram. And guess what? You can still play games with 1GB of vram so its not like suddenly you wont be able to play any games because you only have 3.5GB instead of 4

 

6) then why did you buy it? You could have easily checked the ROPs and VRAM and whatever and returned the card when you saw it didnt meet your specifications.

 

 

Im gonna have to side with @Enderman on this one. Everyone took a look at the performance benchmarks and decided that for the amount of money they were spending this card made sense, and bought one.

 

Now a few months have past and a very few people have noticed some rather odd behavior of these cards and found that there are two partition of memory on the card and the second .5GB partition is much slower than the first 3.5GB. Sad face. The performance of your cards is no different from when you bought them and now all of the sudden people have convinced themselves based on this new information that their cards are no longer worth the money. I don't get people some days.

 

Now the second half of this story is where I do believe Nvidia does owe the consumers a bit. The 56 ROPS and 1792 KB L2 Cache vs the marketing claim of 64 ROPs and 2048 KB of L2 Cache. Although I do not believe that Nvidia was deliberately trying to deceive customers, as I have first hand experience with the occasional inept capabilities of marketing departments, however this mistake did somehow make it out to the public. This is where I do think Nvidia should offer a small refund ($15-$20 maybe) for their mistake or a choice of a couple of games on Steam. This error is in my opinion the only true error that Nvidia made with this product, the marketing information.

While I do believe it is blown out of proportion, I am however worried about how the card might handle the last 500MB of RAM. I'm helping a friend build/plan a rig, and I don;t want to be in a situation when the game starts tanking playing future games and having to troubleshoot/give an answer to him. Nvidia should have sold it as a 3.5GB card and not the mythical 4GB which everyone says is necessary for >1080/4K gaming. I'm stretching it a bit, but Nvidia might have been trying to use this 4GB as a selling point in that case yea, bad business practice.

[Opask]

But only 3.5GB are actually useful.

From what I gathered from the pcper thing with one of the senior engineers for nvidia he said that if it needs the extra 500mbs it will access it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Whorax]

From what I gathered from the pcper thing with one of the senior engineers for nvidia he said that if it needs the extra 500mbs it will access it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

That is indeed what he said.

 

What has been proven in tests is that the card absolutely shits out once it passes 3.5GB of VRAM usage. Like becomes borderline unplayable, according to videos I've seen.

[Briggsy]

I bought the EVGA FTW edition which came with a free game already. I'm divided personally. In some ways there should be a recall, but in other ways, using the car example, if you bought a car that can go 100kmh, you have to also asses how often you go 100kmh. I dont believe I use the full extent of my card (playing mostly 1080p games) so personally i dont think ill use every byte of ram 3.5gb gives me anyways. But other people who would use it all kinda deserve it for $350-400USD

 

Using the Car analogy, its like being told you have 4 wheel drive, but in fact only 3 wheels are actually spinning. If the 4th wheel needs to spin, it can only do so if the other three wheels stop spinning. So the three wheels stop spinning, and the 4th wheel spins for a full cycle/rotation by itself, then it stops to let the other 3 wheels do a full rotation. Whenever the 4th wheel is needed this is repeated. meanwhile, you are driving and the car is hitching and stuttering whenever the 4th wheel is being used. no one knows why the car does it, until months later the car maker is forced to reveal that the 4th tire cannot spin at the same time as the other 3, but overall you should be able to maintain speed and vehicle control, and that 4th tire gives you that extra edge when you really need it.

 

(by spin I mean being turned by the engine)

[chopdok]

What pisses me off is I could have actually had the card that would degrade gracefully with time for the same price: namely, a Sapphire Tri-X R9 290x. Now I'm stuck with a card with a shorter shelf life when future proofing was a huge part of why I got the GTX 970. If all I cared about was now I wouldn't have spent $340 on a GPU.

Well, on the other hand, right now you can expect the driver optimisation to happen on day 1. Because GTX 970 is really important for them, even after the whole mess - its still their best offering in gaming segment. GTX 960 is...well, kinda meh, and it gets smacked about by R9 280 and 280X. The GTX 980 is great, but very expensive. So GTX 970 is their front runner, and their best offering currently, despite all of its "undocumented features". Sad but true. This has been the best month for AMD, ever, and they havent even done anything lol.

 

To be fair, the GTX 970 reaction is kinda blown out of proportions. Stuff like this happened before. I am mad at them, but it doesnt meant I will allows myself to go and call them names on their forums. People need to calm down. The law is on your side. The beach of consumer laws is clear and unquestioned. I am still staring at GPU-Z that says my card has 64 ROP, because GPU-Z database is of course made with official information from nVidia. The peak memory bandwith of GTX 970 is lower than advertised, by exactly 1/8. I say, lets give them a small chance to make it right, to apologise and try to figure something out. If they wont - its a class action lawsuit, which they will settle - because they already dont stand any chance in court, their own engieers provided all the testimonies needed to destroy any of their arguments.

[Opask]

That is indeed what he said.

 

What has been proven in tests is that the card absolutely shits out once it passes 3.5GB of VRAM usage. Like becomes borderline unplayable, according to videos I've seen.

Could you possibly link said videos. Not necessarily for me but just for members of this conversation in general. 

[SteveGrabowski]

Well, on the other hand, right now you can expect the driver optimisation to happen on day 1. Because GTX 970 is really important for them, even after the whole mess - its still their best offering in gaming segment. GTX 960 is...well, kinda meh, and it gets smacked about by R9 280 and 280X. The GTX 980 is great, but very expensive. So GTX 970 is their front runner, and their best offering currently, despite all of its "undocumented features". Sad but true. This has been the best month for AMD, ever, and they havent even done anything lol.

 

And then I can expect the drivers to suck once their next 70-series card is a rebranded 980 though and there is no need to optimize for the 3.5+0.5 pools anymore. Yeah, AMD has to be loving this month of failure from Nvidia.