Official Nvidia GTX 970 Discussion Thread

[Dabombinable]

says who? many people including myself dont upgrade each year... what happens when a year from now when BF5 comes out and i cant max it out because it goes over 3.5gb vram? hmmm?

I am also one of those people who don't upgrade every year, in fact I went for 12 years without an upgrade, getting by on a P4 Compaq Pressario R3000 until 2009, then an ex-business 2007 Tecra M5 which struggled to play even Halo 1 (It died at the end of 2013). This rig is the one that I saved up for 12 years, skimping on what I could and waiting for the components most likely to get me 4+ years of gaming at high-ultra settings with a new 1080p screen. And I can say this as I've done my own tests, with the most amount of vRAM I can use in any game is 3GB, and that is with Skyrim heavily modded with custom textures. I ask you this, why would BF5 (if EA even makes it worth buying) use significantly more vRAM than BF4? Because 4GB is going to be mainstream for at least another couple of years. No matter what people say, the GTX 970 does have 4GB of useable vRAM. Of course if I go by what you say it only has 3.5GB, which is utter BS because as usual I did my own tests to confirm what I heard, and with the same graphics card as you I hit 3.933GB of vRAM usage, with the speed of the last 500MB only being noticeable when doing a memory burn with Kombuster.

[Linusinium]

I have a 970 since November, it's cool that it stays below a 150W draw but I don't buy that anyone spends $300+ on a GPU because it's "efficient". 

Again, it's cute that it doesn't draw much power but performance first. I am not happy with the bad info on 970's but I'm not terribly upset either.

The card works well for me so far. 

[SSOB]

Meanwhile at nvidia hq

Typical marketing team, "yeah dude we can say it has 4GB memory and the full rops, nobody will notice"

-engineer: "but the people who buy these things are actually smart..."

-marketeer: "I worked at beats, look at the succes we had, I think I know what i'm doing."

'engineer- "whatever man"

A few weeks later

"The ceo called me, we have a problem johny..."

-engineer " told you, you owe me 20 bucks ahhahahah"

This is actually how it went for those wondering

[Snickerzz]

DSR? 

4k, ultra preset.

 

still couldn't get it up to 3.6gb

 

http://i.imgur.com/0h7miaP.png

[Snickerzz]

I am also one of those people who don't upgrade every year, in fact I went for 12 years without an upgrade, getting by on a P4 Compaq Pressario R3000 until 2009, then an ex-business 2007 Tecra M5 which struggled to play even Halo 1 (It died at the end of 2013). This rig is the one that I saved up for 12 years, skimping on what I could and waiting for the components most likely to get me 4+ years of gaming at high-ultra settings with a new 1080p screen. And I can say this as I've done my own tests, with the most amount of vRAM I can use in any game is 3GB, and that is with Skyrim heavily modded with custom textures. I ask you this, why would BF5 (if EA even makes it worth buying) use significantly more vRAM than BF4? Because 4GB is going to be mainstream for at least another couple of years. No matter what people say, the GTX 970 does have 4GB of useable vRAM. Of course if I go by what you say it only has 3.5GB, which is utter BS because as usual I did my own tests to confirm what I heard, and with the same graphics card as you I hit 3.933GB of vRAM usage, with the speed of the last 500MB only being noticeable when doing a memory burn with Kombuster.

whats stopping them from using that amount of vram? or any other game coming out over the next couple of years... and there are some cards that aren't effected for whatever reason. but mine suffered from stuttering whenever it went over 3.5gb in watch dogs. sure that game isnt perfect but it is fine until i go over that 3.5gb "cap" many others have had the same experience in many other games.. i paid for 4GB GDDR5 256bit vram, not 3.5 at 256bit and .5gb cache

[Dabombinable]

whats stopping them from using that amount of vram? or any other game coming out over the next couple of years... and there are some cards that aren't effected for whatever reason. but mine suffered from stuttering whenever it went over 3.5gb in watch dogs. sure that game isnt perfect but it is fine until i go over that 3.5gb "cap" many others have had the same experience in many other games.. i paid for 4GB GDDR5 256bit vram, not 3.5 at 256bit and .5gb cache

You do realize how badly optimized watchdogs is?

[Snickerzz]

You do realize how badly optimized watchdogs is?

yup. At this moment i dont have a game that is vram hungry and well optimized

[LukaP]

It is not just about this stupid gaming 4k bullshit, if you have bought this card for any sort of 3D work or video editing (some kinds do use quite a bit of vram with cuda acceleration) then this is really annoying. I have looked at benchmarks for 4k gaming, but I don't just look at those when I decide to buy a card, I look at the specs of said card. When I looked I saw it had 4GB of video ram and those specified L2 Cache with that nummer of cores. Now it turns out I don't get that. It is completely unimportant for me whether I would actually use all that power (L2 cache will be used completely though). I wanted to buy a card with these specs, regardless what those benchmarks said and for a reason that is unimportant. Now it turns out I got a card that just doesn't have these specs and Nvidia lied about it. That is my issue. I don't care that the benchmarks are still relevant, the card I bought isn't the card I wanted to buy, simple as that. 

 

I am a little bit of an Nvidia fan boy and will never buy AMD, but I am genuily considering to return this GTX970 and buy a GTX980 instead. 

Then you should not have bought into GM204 since at compute, it performs worse than a GK110, and that was know from the day one. so your problem for not informing yourself before buying.

 

And to all the people bitching about false advertising its not, It has 4GB of vRAM and has the amount of SMMs enabled as it had in the begining. If you wanted to properly inform yourself about the card, you shoulve checked how the architecture works (several sites explained it, as have i a while ago) and would realise that its more than just an underclock on a 980. So again, you didnt do your research and are bitching now. Same about the performance, check benchmarks for what res you want, decide on that, dont bitch when you dont.

 

@Victorious Secret @mr moose @MEC-777 and the rest, good job on trying to contain all the bullshit... oh my god do people not use their brains when they sit behind a computer at all it seems

[Texhnlyze]

Then you should not have bought into GM204 since at compute, it performs worse than a GK110, and that was know from the day one. so your problem for not informing yourself before buying.

 

And to all the people bitching about false advertising its not, It has 4GB of vRAM and has the amount of SMMs enabled as it had in the begining. If you wanted to properly inform yourself about the card, you shoulve checked how the architecture works (several sites explained it, as have i a while ago) and would realise that its more than just an underclock on a 980. So again, you didnt do your research and are bitching now. Same about the performance, check benchmarks for what res you want, decide on that, dont bitch when you dont.

 

@Victorious Secret @mr moose @MEC-777 and the rest, good job on trying to contain all the bullshit... oh my god do people not use their brains when they sit behind a computer at all it seems

 

 

Chill down Luka, it's a lesson for them.

[LukaP]

Chill down Luka, it's a lesson for them.

Perfectly calm here, i just really hate morons and retards thinking they are entitled to something

[jaggysnake57]

While I see the perspective of Victorious Secret, and the ones that say that they are still happy with their 970.

MilkyWhite is right. The error in the marketing material was not corrected immediately, just until now. This is false advertisement. Issue or not, it is false advertisement by definition.

If MilkyWhite you can return your card, I would. It is important to vote with our wallets.

 

 

It's not even about that. Let me put it this way. You give me the choice of buying two oranges, one is slightly larger than the other. I opt to buy the smaller one because it fits my needs only to realize that it's not even an orange, it's a bitter grapefruit.

Of course my GTX 970 isn't worthless, I never implied it is. Not for 1080p or 1440p at least. But for 4K it is utterly worthless now. I had bought the card in anticipation of a 4K G-Sync monitor upgrade this year along with another 970 to power it. But now Nvidia slaps me in the face and tells me my card is worthless for the purpose I had originally bought it for. I'm sorry but if this isn't infuriating enough, the mere aspect of deception is enough for me to call it quits with this rotten arrangement.

UPDATE : And despite what Faa my lead you to believe I do in fact HAVE an MSI Gaming GTX 970, not that I care what an inconsiderate flame-baiter thinks.

 

 

It really isn't. 

Especially when benchmarks for 1080/1440/2160 gameplay were readily available before people decided to buy. The whole world knew this card struggled at 4K. Now people are getting upset about it? Jesus. 

 

all i see is a bunch of people who either dont know what they are talking about, are looking to get something for nothing or who are trying to dump shit on nvidia because there amd fan boys. how many people buy cards based on there fops or the cache!  people look at benchmarks because its show real world performance in a way most people can get and compare

 

miliky.....you sir are an idiot.  first off for thinking that the 970 was a 4k card, second for failing to do your research and thirdly for thinking that your card is some less now than before nvidia didnt break into your house and steel your performance!

[Ex14]

Yeah the 970 is still a beast. But a lie is still a lie.

 

What if Airbus or Boeing lied about the max load of their flagship planes?

As a student previously studying aerospace, I can tell you that the planes would either not be able to take off or break apart upon landing.

Edit : I said my piece on the other thread, but Lets be honest, Nvidia Lied okay done. Isit really a big deal now? No. In the future? Maybe. 

Personally I'm not affected, however it's gonna make me think quite a bit before i recommend the 970 to anyone now, especially if the goal is to "futureproof" That whole "3.5+0.5" of RAM is a huge debacle that nvidia could have solved easily by marketing it as a 3.5GB card instead. The more this thing goes on , it just seems that nvidia MIGHT  have done this intentionally to entice people who were interested in surround or 4k(SLI)  to get this card. Of all the people who are untitled to a say, it is these people. So yea.

TL;DR Nvidia lied. 3.5GB IS alegit issue tho not too big but the 970 is still a fantastic card for now

[bogus]

Meanwhile at nvidia hq

Typical marketing team, "yeah dude we can say it has 4GB memory and the full rops, nobody will notice"

-engineer: "but the people who buy these things are actually smart..."

-marketeer: "I worked at beats, look at the succes we had, I think I know what i'm doing."

'engineer- "whatever man"

A few weeks later

"The ceo called me, we have a problem johny..."

-engineer " told you, you owe me 20 bucks ahhahahah"

This is actually how it went for those wondering

Then you wake up to reality and you realize that there's a Product Manager, that works hand-to-hand with the engineers, and that presents everything to the board of direction and, probably, administration. Yeah everyone from CEO, CFO, CTO, you name it.

 

When it's about millions of dollars of investment everything is checked and rechecked.

If you want to think that a product comes to market in the backdoor, without the knowledge of people with high responsibility that make executive decisions... then you are ridiculously mistaken.

Even the CEO who was on a stage presenting the cards knew about this, and everyone, from engineers to marketing, kept their mouths shut - for 4 months, and would have kept it shut if no one else noticed.

So no, it's not marketing fault, it's everyone from NVIDIA. They thought their customers are ignorant enough to the point they can sell them something while claiming it's another thing.

 

I think NVIDIA is going to have some problems at least in UE.

 

[Ren]

NVidia propaganda I get to archive, neat..

[Sidiox]

LukaP, on 27 Jan 2015 - 10:31 AM, said:

Then you should not have bought into GM204 since at compute, it performs worse than a GK110, and that was know from the day one. so your problem for not informing yourself before buying.

 

And to all the people bitching about false advertising its not, It has 4GB of vRAM and has the amount of SMMs enabled as it had in the begining. If you wanted to properly inform yourself about the card, you shoulve checked how the architecture works (several sites explained it, as have i a while ago) and would realise that its more than just an underclock on a 980. So again, you didnt do your research and are bitching now. Same about the performance, check benchmarks for what res you want, decide on that, dont bitch when you dont.

 

@Victorious Secret @mr moose @MEC-777 and the rest, good job on trying to contain all the bullshit... oh my god do people not use their brains when they sit behind a computer at all it seems

 

Look, I don't care about this card performance or whatever, it preforms just fine for me. And yes indeed it still technically has the 4GB, but you should realize that is it practically just 3.5GB. But nevertheless it is false advertising and they deserve a huge backlash for not telling their customers about it. I don't believe that they didn't know about the issues, they just chose not to disclose, which is also understandable, but they deserve the backlash. Sure they aren't the only lying company in advertisements and it also isn't the biggest lie or problem. But it is still a lie, and they should be held accountable for that. Ofc people have to realize that Nvidia isn't the only one doing this and they shouldn't overreact, but they should certainly react. Because if their customers react it shows them that this sort of actions aren't good and that the should stop.

 

Perhaps everyone is indeed overreacting a bit, but atleast they are reacting and Nvidia deserves that (just like any other company that does this false advertising)

[Majestic]

Meanwhile at nvidia hq

Typical marketing team, "yeah dude we can say it has 4GB memory and the full rops, nobody will notice"

-engineer: "but the people who buy these things are actually smart..."

-marketeer: "I worked at beats, look at the succes we had, I think I know what i'm doing."

'engineer- "whatever man"

A few weeks later

"The ceo called me, we have a problem johny..."

-engineer " told you, you owe me 20 bucks ahhahahah"

This is actually how it went for those wondering

 

This is also how I imagine it worked.

 

Which is a shame, because or the engenius design we have a fast card at a low price because the binning can be less perfect to fit as a 970 than it would've had to be in the previous generation. Or cost a lot more money (L2 cache had to be perfect). So I got nothing against the decision to actually do it. It's just really stupid they didn't properly enclose this.

 

I don't know, I think I'll turn my RMA (card died) from refund to replacement. Still liked the card enough to forgive this. If I was to be principal and refuse to buy Nvidia products, than i'd also have to be angry at MSI, ASUS, EVGA etc for selling the cards. So I couldn't buy an aftermarket unit either. It's stupid.

[LukaP]

Look, I don't care about this card performance or whatever, it preforms just fine for me. And yes indeed it still technically has the 4GB, but you should realize that is it practically just 3.5GB. But nevertheless it is false advertising and they deserve a huge backlash for not telling their customers about it. I don't believe that they didn't know about the issues, they just chose not to disclose, which is also understandable, but they deserve the backlash. Sure they aren't the only lying company in advertisements and it also isn't the biggest lie or problem. But it is still a lie, and they should be held accountable for that. Ofc people have to realize that Nvidia isn't the only one doing this and they shouldn't overreact, but they should certainly react. Because if their customers react it shows them that this sort of actions aren't good and that the should stop.

 

Perhaps everyone is indeed overreacting a bit, but atleast they are reacting and Nvidia deserves that (just like any other company that does this false advertising)

How does this have anything to do with what i said? I was only adressing the performance, which you can do research on before you buy, and if you dont you are a retard. I never said NV didnt lie or how they advertise the card is perfect and angelic, so dont throw me into that camp

[Sidiox]

LukaP, on 27 Jan 2015 - 11:38 AM, said:LukaP, on 27 Jan 2015 - 11:38 AM, said:

How does this have anything to do with what i said? I was only adressing the performance, which you can do research on before you buy, and if you dont you are a retard. I never said NV didnt lie or how they advertise the card is perfect and angelic, so dont throw me into that camp

Then why did you quote my first post then? That was only about how their advertisement wasn't true, regardless of the performance and benchmarks. You tried to throw me into the camp that cares about the benchmarks, which I don't care about.

[Misanthrope]

Then you should not have bought into GM204 since at compute, it performs worse than a GK110, and that was know from the day one. so your problem for not informing yourself before buying.

 

And to all the people bitching about false advertising its not, It has 4GB of vRAM and has the amount of SMMs enabled as it had in the begining. If you wanted to properly inform yourself about the card, you shoulve checked how the architecture works (several sites explained it, as have i a while ago) and would realise that its more than just an underclock on a 980. So again, you didnt do your research and are bitching now. Same about the performance, check benchmarks for what res you want, decide on that, dont bitch when you dont.

 

@Victorious Secret @mr moose @MEC-777 and the rest, good job on trying to contain all the bullshit... oh my god do people not use their brains when they sit behind a computer at all it seems

 

I'm surprised of you, you can join your peers by the way

 

*updates ignore list*

[Majestic]

Then you should not have bought into GM204 since at compute, it performs worse than a GK110, and that was know from the day one. so your problem for not informing yourself before buying.

 

And to all the people bitching about false advertising its not, It has 4GB of vRAM and has the amount of SMMs enabled as it had in the begining. If you wanted to properly inform yourself about the card, you shoulve checked how the architecture works (several sites explained it, as have i a while ago) and would realise that its more than just an underclock on a 980. So again, you didnt do your research and are bitching now. Same about the performance, check benchmarks for what res you want, decide on that, dont bitch when you dont.

 

@Victorious Secret @mr moose @MEC-777 and the rest, good job on trying to contain all the bullshit... oh my god do people not use their brains when they sit behind a computer at all it seems

 

Are you seriously advocating "caveat emptor" right now? NO tech site, not even pcper.com, knew that an L2 portion was disabled and it had 56 ROP's. You could've done weeks of research and not know about it. The only revised those stats AFTER nvidia "came clean".

 

So no, don't you even dare say caveat emptor, it's unfair.

[bogus]

Are you seriously advocating "caveat emptor" right now? NO tech site, not even pcper.com, knew that an L2 portion was disabled and it had 56 ROP's. You could've done weeks of research and not know about it. The only revised those stats AFTER nvidia "came clean".

 

So no, don't you even dare say caveat emptor, it's unfair.

This has leaked, so yeah, it was impossible for reviewers to know something was wrong:

 

[Zulkkis]

The biggest difference is the VRAM, but there's also stuff regarding the RoPs. Even if the cards are intended for gaming, there are some other uses for the cards as well.

 

And realistically you don't stalk benchmarks all day long, because old benchmarks in particular tend to get inaccurate. What you see when you are looking at the original specs of the GTX 970 compared to the GTX 980, is a card with slightly less CUDA Cores. So any game that utilizes SLI will perform better on 2 x GTX 970 as opposed to a single GTX 980.

 

Now they intentionally hampered the card's performance at higher resolutions. Sure you could say that "only buy high-end cards for those" but ffs the difference in the original specs are smaller than what something like GTX 570 and GTX 580 had. Same memory bandwidth, total memory, ROPs, everything relevant is there. The only real difference was the amount of texture units and cores: that's an easy thing to make up for in games that support SLI. For all intents and purposes, with the orgiinal specs the GTX 970 could be considered a high-end card and the 980 as some sort of "RoG Matrix" version of it. I don't particularly see the 980 or 970 as high-end cards though, due to the amount of VRAM they have in the first place (even with og specs) and the fact that they're just holding out for the big chips like they did with the GTX 600 -series.

 

I'm fairly sure this was a mistake - but they didn't come up and tell us about it until other people had figured it out. People should be entitled a refund if they choose to do so. For 1080p gaming it's still the best new card, but before this fact I could consider the GTX 970 essentially as a GTX 980 with fewer CUDA cores and some texture units cut out..

[Majestic]

Now they intentionally hampered the card's performance at higher resolutions. Sure you could say that "only buy high-end cards for those" but ffs the difference in the original specs are smaller than what something like GTX 570 and GTX 580 had. Same memory bandwidth, total memory, ROPs, everything relevant is there. The only real difference was the amount of texture units and cores: that's an easy thing to make up for in games that support SLI. For all intents and purposes, with the orgiinal specs the GTX 970 could be considered a high-end card and the 980 as some sort of "RoG Matrix" version of it. I don't particularly see the 980 or 970 as high-end cards though, due to the amount of VRAM they have in the first place (even with og specs) and the fact that they're just holding out for the big chips like they did with the GTX 600 -series.

 

I'm fairly sure this was a mistake - but they didn't come up and tell us about it until other people had figured it out. People should be entitled a refund if they choose to do so. For 1080p gaming it's still the best new card, but before this fact I could consider the GTX 970 essentially as a GTX 980 with fewer CUDA cores and some texture units cut out..

 

They did not intentionally hampered the card. The ROP's still active have a higher throughput than the 13 active SMM's. The whole reason the 970 is so cheap is because of the state the chip could be in to fit as a 970. It could have 3 broken SMM's and only 7/8th of the cache. Having the full ROP's on the 970 wouldn't have matter much really.

[FakezZ]

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.

Does it matter? It could be the fastest thing available, but that does not change the fact that NVIDIA flat-out lied. NVIDIA is never an option again for me...

[Misanthrope]

They did not intentionally hampered the card. The ROP's still active have a higher throughput than the 13 active SMM's. The whole reason the 970 is so cheap is because of the state the chip could be in to fit as a 970. It could have 3 broken SMM's and only 7/8th of the cache. Having the full ROP's on the 970 wouldn't have matter much really.

 

It wouldn't matter at all if it wasn't advertised. But it was, henceforth it is false advertisement. There's a reason why false advertisement is illegal and it should be denounced and this very product gives you a reason why: If you lie in an area that doesn't matter, what stops you from lying on an area that does matter, like total available, high performing vram which does affect people who bought the card for the very purpose of using SLI for 4k gaming with it, something at the time this card came out was the best performance/price option for 4k gaming?

If you say one is ok you're saying the other it's ok as well, that's why it's not a matter of how relevant of a lie it was but just that it was a lie and people are entitled to compensation for it.