Official Nvidia GTX 970 Discussion Thread

[kpreg]

We didn't buy this card directly for 4k. most of us bought it with future-proofing or monitor upgrade ability in mind. I have a 1080p monitor right now, but with the prices lowering on 4k monitors, I might get one soon. These are the people who are mad and deserve a refund, and I'm one of them. SLI 970 is AMAZING for 4k, and Linus himself says so:

 

(start at 9:30)

[handymanshandle]

I'm glad we continue to talk about how Nvidia lied about the 970, yet everyone was being blown away by it's benchmarks on release for it's price point.

An older architecture in (R9 290(X)) two way mode/crossfire can get do as good as or better than a single 970, SLI 970 and possibly a 980, and cost less than the Nvidia solution. 

[Suika]

So did Linus lie too? Or are you guys (those claim dual 970s != 4k) lying?

I was referring to single 970 configurations, the 970 by itself is not a good 4K gaming card.

 

In most tests, though, the GTX 970 SLI is better at 4K than AMD's offerings, but marginally so. The fact that the 290X is cheaper can be outweighed by the fact that you can get away with a cheaper PSU on the GTX 970 in SLI, too.

 

http://www.techspot.com/review/898-geforce-gtx-970-sli-4k-gaming/page2.html

[Ex14]

Victorious is referring to the specs the card actually shipped with, not the specs that were advertised.

Ah okay my bad then sorry @Victorious Secret

[spwath]

Who cares?
You all loved the card until you heard it was bad, even tho you loved the performance untill then.

It doesnt matter.

[kpreg]

Who cares?

You all loved the card until you heard it was bad, even tho you loved the performance untill then.

It doesnt matter.

But it does.

 

We didn't buy this card directly for 4k. most of us bought it with future-proofing or monitor upgrade ability in mind. I have a 1080p monitor right now, but with the prices lowering on 4k monitors, I might get one soon. These are the people who are mad and deserve a refund, and I'm one of them. SLI 970 is AMAZING for 4k, and Linus himself says so:

 

(start at 9:30)

[Shahnewaz]

Interesting thing someone mentioned on SemiAccurate forums:

If GPU-Z reads the incorrect number of ROPs and cache, does that mean GPU-Z does not directly read from the GPU bios, rather fetches data from a database based on the GPU ID ?

Cause it was a marketing mistake, so the BIOS information would have been perfectly in line with the actual design specs too. Pretty sure marketing people don't write the BIOS, right?

 

Edit: Fixed a working.

Edited January 28, 2015 by Shahnewaz

[SkilledRebuilds]

Two ways to think of this...

 

True, cards a beast.... and until it's using above 3.5GB of Vram, it's an overkill card & will suit needs well.

 

But initial Info given about the card was not entirely accurate...and this is a main driving factor for the abuse given...misleading information or outright withheld info... that's not good.

 

Buying two of these for triple monitor gaming (WITH upscaling as people with ample power will do it, I know I would) will lead to issues of tanked performance... a LOT of people bought two of these.

[Guest Kloaked]

An older architecture in (R9 290(X)) two way mode/crossfire can get do as good as or better than a single 970, SLI 970 and possibly a 980, and cost less than the Nvidia solution.

Thanks, Captain Off-Topic.

Plus, the 970 and 290x's are about the same price, and the 970 sometimes beats the 290x. So no, you're not 100% correct.

[Norman_the_Owl]

Jesus why does this have over 600 replies, it can't be that heated can it?

[Faa]

Far cry 4 and other games also use more than 3 GB VRAM At 4k.

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tu86z/discussion_i_benchmarked_gtx_970s_in_sli_at_1440p/

 

Look buddy its not a matter of the performance , its a matter of nvidia faking the specs and thats shady as fuck.

Its a moral issue at the end of the day.

 

I think most people are mad because they were scammed and their card dies after 3.5 GB VRAM as ilustrated on the link i shared.

 

There is no principle for a class action lawsuit?

What about false advertisement , faking specs.

 

Proof:

How much ram is being used means nothing, totally nothing. Don't argue here (you're really embarrassing yourself here) if you're understanding a damn of this. I'll explain it you, probably you've been explained this over 10 times who knows.

When is your GPU performing at it's full potential? When the GPU usage is all the time at 99% duh

What can prevent your GPU from running below 99% usage eg 80%? CPU bottleneck (doesn't matter here), lack of VRAM or a memory controller bottleneck. 

When you run out of vram, the GPU starts to use the storage drive as additional VRAM which is a million times slower than GDDR5 (yes an SSD), the drive will be a major bottleneck and your game will totally freeze for x time with a 0% usage and 0 fps. A storage drive is not fast enough to keep up, it wouldn't have been an issue if we had SSD's that were faster than GDDR5 (GPU vendors wouldn't even bother putting vram on the pcb anymore).

The issue here is, the last 0.5GB is running off a single 32 bit controller (there are 8 of them forming a 256 bit controller). Now, because you use more than 3.5GB it DOESN'T mean it's going to bottleneck the GPU. It totally depends. Besides have you ever asked yourself how much of that VRAM are actually cached resources? It's like this, you play a singleplayer game you're about to open a door, the game starts storing some VRAM that's needed to accelerate the loading screen, that part only gets processed by the GPU after you open the door. Games are known to cache a shit ton of resources.

When I had my 670 2GB, in BF4 it was all the time max'ed out, never saw any dips below 99% usage. Upgraded to my 780, it's averaging at 2500MB >.> Caching more than ever? I'll give you a good example, let's have analyse this graph;

A 780 Ti with 4x AA using 3GB and the Titan with 4x AA using 3.7GB, so the 780 Ti will perform worse right?

Hell no you're wrong. Anything else I have to explain you? Look what I marked in bold, that should be the conclusion.

[MEC-777]

32 pages (*edit* 33) of bickering over a minor GPU spec discrepency. Wow.

 

First world problems at it finest.

 

I think we all need to step back, take a breather and just chill out for a bit. Go play some games, do some work or whatever - clear your heads and wait for more information/decisions from Nvidia and 3rd party suppliers.

[SteveGrabowski]

This thread is still going?  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

[sgloux3470]

Two ways to think of this...

 

True, cards a beast.... and until it's using above 3.5GB of Vram, it's an overkill card & will suit needs well.

 

But initial Info given about the card was not entirely accurate...and this is a main driving factor for the abuse given...misleading information or outright withheld info... that's not good.

 

Buying two of these for triple monitor gaming (WITH upscaling as people with ample power will do it, I know I would) will lead to issues of tanked performance... a LOT of people bought two of these.

 

It's really, really hard to hit 4 GB of Vram usage except in cases where the engine does it automatically.  

 

Any sources on SLI 970's offering tanked performance at 4K/Ultra wide multimonitor resolutions?  

[handymanshandle]

Thanks, Captain Off-Topic.

Plus, the 970 and 290x's are about the same price, and the 970 sometimes beats the 290x. So no, you're not 100% correct.

Not really off topic, but erm okay.

[Opcode]

Interesting thing someone mentioned on SemiAccurate forums:

If GPU-Z reads the incorrect number of ROPs and cache, does that mean GPU-Z does not directly read from the GPU bios, rather fetches data from a database based on the GPU ID ?

Cause it was a marketing mistake, so the BIOS information would have been perfectly in line with the misleading specs too. Pretty sure marketing people don't write the BIOS, right?

The creator of GPU-Z specified that it doesn't query against a database. Which I don't blame him as I would be probing registers as well. From the looks of it GPU-Z is fooled into thinking it's a full featured core because the ROP/MC partitions are still active even tho they aren't utilized.

[Michael McAllister]

@LukaP, I agree that this issue has been blown out of proportion by many posters here, however, Nvidia might be in some legal trouble.  Mistake or not, the original reviewer's guide had specs listed that were not correct.  Has the performance suddenly changed overnight because of this?  No, absolutely not.

Curious to see how Nvidia's lawyers will get around this issue.  Having no legal expertise (grain of salt and all of that), this definitely seems like it would fall under that definition from a strict legal point of view.  Thoughts?

[reapersivan]

Sue them like the Sony scandal of the Killzone Shadow Fall, Resolution? FREE GPUS TO ALL!

[PopReference]

The creator of GPU-Z specified that it doesn't query against a database. Which I don't blame him as I would be probing registers as well. From the looks of it GPU-Z is fooled into thinking it's a full featured core because the ROP/MC partitions are still active even tho they aren't utilized.

That was actually mentioned in the PCPer video, I remember. Originally the 970 wouldn't display anything (we know why now) so an Nvidia driver update fixed it to say 64.

[Richard Burton]

thats not true, look at pcper's article on this subject, there is one l2 disabled for the purposes of chip binning and 980 differentiation and the Vram is then averaged in if it goes above 3.5gb of frame buffer 

[Suika]

Interesting thing someone mentioned on SemiAccurate forums:

If GPU-Z reads the incorrect number of ROPs and cache, does that mean GPU-Z does not directly read from the GPU bios, rather fetches data from a database based on the GPU ID ?

Cause it was a marketing mistake, so the BIOS information would have been perfectly in line with the misleading specs too. Pretty sure marketing people don't write the BIOS, right?

GPU-Z is completely unable to spot Maxwell's newest, but unlisted ability to disable ROPs. 

 

The GTX 970 and 980 are both using GM204 cores, with the 970 having SMMs and ROPs disabled, and a memory controller partially disabled. GPU-Z is detecting all ROPs despite Maxwell having the ability to disable them.

[zanduh]

32 pages (*edit* 33) of bickering over a minor GPU spec discrepency. Wow.

 

First world problems at it finest.

 

I think we all need to step back, take a breather and just chill out for a bit. Go play some games, do some work or whatever - clear your heads and wait for more information/decisions from Nvidia and 3rd party suppliers.

 

I don't understand either side of this. People are getting really really upset over this on one side and on the other you have people saying it's bad to be upset in the slightest when a company doesn't give accurate info. 

[kpreg]

I don't understand either side of this. People are getting really really upset over this on one side and on the other you have people saying it's bad to be upset in the slightest when a company doesn't give accurate info. 

I'm definitely against NVIDIA's false advertising, as everyone who owns a 970 should be.

[mr moose]

No I'm saying this card should perform like it has 4GB Vram as advertised and not like a 3,5GB card with a slow 500mb cache.

The only advertised cut down were the Cuda Cores which is not the actual case.

It shouldn't start stuttering at 3,5GB it's that simple and I hope people get a refund or Nvidia sued for this.

 

 

So your saying it should perform like it's not cut down?  The only reason the last 512M of ram is slow is because the card is cut down. 

 

Sue Nvidia for false advertising, sure if that makes you feel better.  

 

 

Jesus why does this have over 600 replies, it can't be that heated can it?

 

Unfortunately people are having trouble separating the intrinsic condition/worth of a product and how the company has presented it.  It's almost like some of these guys have never encountered marketing before. 

[MEC-777]

I don't understand either side of this. People are getting really really upset over this on one side and on the other you have people saying it's bad to be upset in the slightest when a company doesn't give accurate info. 

 

Not quite.

 

Yes, 970 owners have a right to be upset - to a degree. But in the end it's really not that big of a deal, they should get over it and move on with their lives.