Geforce GTX 970 Conclusion.

[Briggsy]

Yup, it can be a pretty serious issue for some people, since Nvidia never said a word about this until people found out the weird stuttering and low performance when going above 3.5GB.

First they said "yup, this is an issue, send us logs and proofs, we're working on it to fix it"

Then they said "is working as intended, 3.5GB + 0.5GB"

After that the ROPS/cache thing came up. Geforce forums were flooded by angry dudes.

A Nvidia worker (senior-idon'tknowwhy) said that he understands people getting mad, that it's ok and that they're working on a driver to fix this and kinda improve performance.

Now, Nvidia says that they're not going to improve the performance with the driver.

Also one mod said that they're looking to fill up that 0.5GB with driver stuff since that segment isn't that useful for games.

So basically only 3.5GB is useful for gaming, the other 0.5GB is the "dud" that thinks he's special and that he can do something useful, but nope.

Some people get mad because Nvidia lied to them, and that's true, they lied more than once. I understand them.

Some people say that they're overeacting, but maybe that dudes were students for example that tried to save money for a lot of time just to get the card, they get it and now they get kinda "scammed". That sucks

 

And then there's the fact that windows controls which memory is used, and system ram has much better latency, so the 512MB partition barely gets used even for fluff data.

[Imakuni]

Some people say that they're overeacting, but maybe that dudes were students for example that tried to save money for a lot of time just to get the card, they get it and now they get kinda "scammed". That sucks

"students that tried to save money for a lot of time" don't shop for specs. They shop for performance.

 

If they decided that the performance shown in benchmarks was worth their money... well, they DID get all they paid for. They weren't scammed.

[Doughnutnator]

"students that tried to save money for a lot of time" don't shop for specs. They shop for performance.

If they decided that the performance shown in benchmarks was worth their money... well, they DID get all they paid for. They weren't scammed.

I watched a lot of reviews before buying the 970. Linus video was one of them

When I got the 970 it was the "same GPU as the 980 with less CUDA cores and slower clockspeeds". That's one of the reasons I got it.

Getting the card to play minesweeper or smash potatoes doesn't change the fact that they lied to customers.

I'm pretty sure that if someone had enough balls and money to sue Nvidia it would win the case for "False Advertising".

VRAM is important for performance.

Even if you take away the ROPS/cache thing, the VRAM stuff it's still there, and Nvidia branded the 970 as a 4GB of usable frame buffer card, not a 3.5+0.5 card (now they do, they corrected the specs)

EDIT: Oh, and i'm a student that saved tons of money to get the 970, I looked at the specs. Not only me, the 8-10 guys in my school that got a 970 also looked at specs, and they're mad.

Please don't generalize

[Whorax]

At the end of the day Nvidia is *selling* us a GTX 980 with a few SMs disabled, 8 fewer ROPS, 3.5GB+.5GB pool of VRAM and .3mb less L2 cache for 200 dollars less.

At the end of the day Nvidia still mislead their customers, and I'm sure had people known that the card only has 3.5GB of useable VRAM it wouldn't have sold as much. Would it have sold well? Yes, but not this well.

 

May I ask how difficult it was for you to talk NewEgg into a refund?

[ander12391]

It wasn't to hard to get a refund. I pretty much told them this "I understand that it isn't your fault that Nvidia falsely advertised the specs of the product. But i shouldn't be punished because one of your vendors is misleading their customers on the specifications of an product".

The rep put me on hold for about 5 mins then came back and offered a refund as store credit. Also something that helped me was the fact that I've worked at places like Apple Care and Geek Squad. So I know how to talk to customer service reps.