Official Nvidia GTX 970 Discussion Thread

[Guest Kloaked]

I made a test Video with watch dogs on my YouTube channel. I still didn't validate the result with my 980. So it was either the vram issue or a general performance issue. Also my i5 has so trouble keeping up, so that could also be a factor. Someone with a crazy LGA 2011 i7 needs to make the tests.

I tested watch dogs with a 970 at whatever the first DSR resolution is and I had some stuttering when it reached into the "slow vram", but it went away after a few seconds and was fine.

Watch Dogs eats up even my 770's full 4gb just at 1080p but I still can't keep a steady 60fps. Game is shite performance wise.

[Guest]

What to do?! Here is my conversation with an un-named Nvidia executive that I had today:

 

ME:

 

    Hello, Sir. I have purchased 5 Nvidia graphics cards in one year (660, 770, 650, 970, 960). They all have been incredible except for the 970. I attempted to return it to Newegg (I felt that something was wrong with the performance which ended up being the VRAM) but they did not accept my return. I was not able to sell it on eBay with success. So I needed to sell my entire system (I was planning to change parts anyways so if I was going to sell one I might as well sell them all). I paid about $1500 for the parts. I was only able to sell the PC for $1050 after 3 months of trying. I had to pay fees to eBay and shipping was about $100. I got about $800 from it all. So, I pretty much lost $700 from the miscommunication between the design and advertisement teams and Newegg refusing return. But with that $800 guess what I bought? New parts for my secondary PC including a GTX 960 from MSI. I was still a loyal customer after I was indirectly and unintentionally taken $700. Also I made a positive video over the GTX 970 that has gained over 10,000 views on YouTube and swayed a decent number of purchases from positive reactions to performance and conversations in the comments. I like Nvidia. I will support your company as long as you make good products. I even have a Shield. I know that you have a lot going on with law suits over this. I just think that $40 from Newegg can’t compensate for $700 indirectly lost. Yes it was my decision to sell the computer. But I would’ve never had to sell it if the 970 didn’t have VRAM problems. Thank you for your time. I can provide proof of purchase (and selling) of every item mentioned here if you would like.


*Just to clarify I am not asking you for $700 (I would have to be stupid to do that) I am simply letting you be aware of my situation.*

 

HIM: 

 

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your note, Jensen is traveling and asked me to get back to you.

We all work very hard to build great products for gamers, that is why I love working at NVIDIA.

I appreciate your support as a GeForce gamer and especially for promoting the GTX970 on Youtube.

Personally, I believe the GTX970 is the best product we have ever offered by most measures; performance, power, price, memory.

I am not sure what performance problems you saw with the GTX970, but I am pretty certain we could have addressed them.

That said, I am sorry we disappointed you with our communication about the GTX970 memory architecture, and that you decided to sell your system.

It is a small token, but if you are interested in some NVIDIA gear to decorate yourself or your PC, I can get some out to you.

I hope we can win back your trust.

 

 

ME:

 

Oh that would be great! My address is: -------------------

 

Also, I know you usually work with Corsair but if you could maybe ask Fractal Josh if I can obtain an R4 side panel from somewhere that'd be great. Thanks for the quick response. 

 

Should I maybe come across as a leech and ask for more? I asked a few people and they all said to ask them for $700 straight up and what not. Similarly, others said that $10 worth of stickers is no compensation at all. WHAT TO DO?!!?

 

[GrimNeo]

My VRAM issues are back in the NewEgg warehouse because I got a full refund on both of mine! B)

Wait they ended up giving you the full refund. That's great news. Last post I read from you about this was that they were giving a little less because of the re-stocking. Maybe $100 less. I would have to search this thread again.

 

Whorax, on 10 Feb 2015 - 9:28 PM, said:

    I won a free R9 290X from that AMD giveaway on Twitter. I have my temporary solution covered.

    The $600 credit I get (along with the price I sell my 290X for when I'm done with it) will probably go towards one of the new cards once they come out.

    Whorax, on 11 Feb 2015 - 12:18 PM, said:

    Yeah, the $100 subtraction is in fact from the restocking fees, that's what the rep told me. I think I'm fine with that refund anyway to be honest. Like others have said, the R9 290X that I won will cover that $100 loss I'm taking. []

 

omg found it.

[euniqe]

So far out of all the people who have posted.......1 has a 970.

 

 

Let's add 1 more to that number. I am probably the only Proud owner of a GTX 970 card (EVGA ACX FTW). 

 

To me, this vRam "issue" has been complete garbage. I have run both games and stresss-testers / virtual scenarios (Ungine etc.) downsampled from high-resolutions (4k etc.) and still never encountered any "stuttering" or noticeably decrease in performance when the vram loaded up. I use HwInfo paired with RivaTuner's OSD to monitor my vram load in real-time measured in both percentage and megabytes.

 

It's just....complete bullshit as far as I can tell. 

[Dabombinable]

So far out of all the people who have posted.......1 has a 970.

Uhhh, hello, its all over the specs of my rig. Do people need to show a photo of theirs in front of their profile now?

[rentaspoon]

So kitguru still think its a driver issue, my opinion of them has dropped a little.http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-ceo-addresses-geforce-gtx-970-scandal-in-open-letter-to-customers/

Thing is I'm now at the point of upgrading from my R9 270 and want an Nvidia card, the 970 is ideal for me but the issue is worrying me for future games.

Even if my common sense says it'll be fine

[Whorax]

Wait they ended up giving you the full refund. That's great news. Last post I read from you about this was that they were giving a little less because of the re-stocking. Maybe $100 less. I would have to search this thread again.

 

Whorax, on 10 Feb 2015 - 9:28 PM, said:

    I won a free R9 290X from that AMD giveaway on Twitter. I have my temporary solution covered.

    The $600 credit I get (along with the price I sell my 290X for when I'm done with it) will probably go towards one of the new cards once they come out.

    Whorax, on 11 Feb 2015 - 12:18 PM, said:

    Yeah, the $100 subtraction is in fact from the restocking fees, that's what the rep told me. I think I'm fine with that refund anyway to be honest. Like others have said, the R9 290X that I won will cover that $100 loss I'm taking. [ ]

 

omg found it.

Yep, the rep ended up getting me back all of it.

[FatalityDiablo]

hey when i oc my gtx 970, will it const be at the mhz point or how does that work? it will be here next week, just want to know in advance

[Razzaa]

So kitguru still think its a driver issue, my opinion of them has dropped a little.http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-ceo-addresses-geforce-gtx-970-scandal-in-open-letter-to-customers/

Thing is I'm now at the point of upgrading from my R9 270 and want an Nvidia card, the 970 is ideal for me but the issue is worrying me for future games.

Even if my common sense says it'll be fine

No vram issue with a single 970. Yet to see any evidence of it. I have tested most new AAA games that use that much vram. Anything ay reasonable fps wont cause problems.

[pdv789]

I still own my 970 and really don't plan on getting rid of it. I like the card, I am very upset over the fact they 'miscommunicated' such crucial information but what happened is done. It still performs overall up to my expectations with one exception; Starcitizen. I EASILY hit over 3.5 and do notice what I think is a dropped frame or at least a slight stutter. But other than that it's a great card. I am happy to own it, not happy with Nvidia. I personally will favor the red side until they earn my trust back and/or something worse happens with team red. For me it's always the lesser of two evils because I just want the best one I can have.

[mr moose]

 

It's just....complete bullshit as far as I can tell. 

 

I think there is an issue, the problem is you need a specific synthetic test that measures bandwidth of the vram,  I am starting to doubt these videos that show stuttering, as most of them don't show the any of the settings or any other qualifiers to indicate that it is specifically the ram that is the issue (there are a lot more qualified videos showing smooth operation upto 4G).  Most of the videos that show the card dropping in performance do so at points where the card would fail due to raw processing power anyway.

 

I think the biggest issue is the people who want to see nvidia die in a fire, they are overstating the case and not stopping to properly ascertain the situation. 

 

Of course there also the fact that the ROPs and cache aren't as we were lead to believe.  This is different thing to the performance of the card though.

 

But as I have said before and I will say it again, everyone is entitled to their opinion, if they don't like what happened enough to want to return their card then that is fine and their right.  However on the balance of evidence some people in this thread might have gotten carried away.

[rentaspoon]

No vram issue with a single 970. Yet to see any evidence of it. I have tested most new AAA games that use that much vram. Anything ay reasonable fps wont cause problems.

yeah it's just that, the spoilt for choice on which card to get plus UK customer service for most places have gone way downhill.

 

I brought several different parts from several different places last year and had issues with everyone, even ebuyer who i use to pay extra due to there good customer service been using them since about 2003.

[TravisTea]

Can't you just disable the 500 mb of slower vram and fix any issues with the card on the spot? Would just make too much sense.. Or limit how much vram games can access?

[CoolaxGaming]

You could do that but that would make even more issues. Nvidia would make look guilty as actually disabling the last 0.5 gig. Making it a physically a 3.5 gig card and technically a 3.5 gig card. Then the sellers would HAVE to refund if the buyer wants one

[SteveGrabowski]

Can't you just disable the 500 mb of slower vram and fix any issues with the card on the spot? Would just make too much sense.. Or limit how much vram games can access?

 

For the most part I think that's what the drivers do already.

[JoshM]

You could do that but that would make even more issues. Nvidia would make look guilty as actually disabling the last 0.5 gig. Making it a physically a 3.5 gig card and technically a 3.5 gig card. Then the sellers would HAVE to refund if the buyer wants one

Even if they made it an option in a future driver?

[CoolaxGaming]

Even if they made it an option in a future driver?

An option is fine, because it is still a 4gb card. But if it is like mandatory and unchangeable without a hack then we can all go to Nvidia and burn their office down.

[Guest Kloaked]

In everyone's testing who actually owns the 970's, the card runs fine even with the slow 512Mb of VRAM. There's no reason the last partition shouldn't be accessed when the card needs to access it since it doesn't hinder performance.

[givingtnt]

just take a kinfe, and pop that chip out of the pcb

[Aniallation]

In everyone's testing who actually owns the 970's, the card runs fine even with the slow 512Mb of VRAM. There's no reason the last partition shouldn't be accessed when the card needs to access it since it doesn't hinder performance.

Uhh, yes, it does hinder performance. 

 

The last 512MB of VRAM is at around 28 GB/s... that's not much more then the speed of GDDR3. And considering that there's already a noticeable performance difference between the DDR3 and DDR5 versions of the GT 640, yes the 970 will be impacted. Use common sense.

[Guest Kloaked]

Uhh, yes, it does hinder performance. 

 

The last 512MB of VRAM is at around 28 GB/s... that's not much more then the speed of GDDR3. And considering that there's already a noticeable performance difference between the DDR3 and DDR5 versions of the GT 640, yes the 970 will be impacted. Use common sense.

 

@Razzaa seems to not have any issues even at 1440p.

 

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/303276-official-nvidia-gtx-970-discussion-thread/?p=4306910

 

Also, we already talked about being insulting via PM's - telling me to use common sense, like I haven't done my research on this is insulting. Please stop.

[Prastupok]

Uhh, yes, it does hinder performance. 

 

The last 512MB of VRAM is at around 28 GB/s... that's not much more then the speed of GDDR3. And considering that there's already a noticeable performance difference between the DDR3 and DDR5 versions of the GT 640, yes the 970 will be impacted. Use common sense.

 

There are people running at 4K with SLI 970s (I will be joining that group when my cards arrive tomorrow) but one user said that he hasn't had any issues.

[Enderman]

Ok obviously people dont understand the issue here.

 

The last half gig of vram causes performance issues because it runs too slow.

If you remove the last half gig of vram it WILL NOT RUN AT ALL

what do you think happens when you run out of vram? stuttering and frame drops!

not having the extra half gig will just make your frame drops worse

 

The issue is that games are reaching over 3.5GB of vram usage at 4k and that is what causes the stuttering

 

Having a massive slow down at 3.5GB is basically almost the same as only having 3.5GB

removing the last 500MB wont change anything

[Aniallation]

Also, we already talked about being insulting via PM's - telling me to use common sense, like I haven't done my research on this is insulting. Please stop.

It's not an insult, it's just saying what it is. If you use all 4GB it's not like performance will totally tank because only 1/8 of the total data on VRAM is slow. If you were to use only the data on that 1/8 portion, then performance would be downright awful. However this is not to be said that the 0.5GB doesn't affect performance, because it does, even if it's to a small extent in many cases, it does affect performance.

 

I'm not saying that you haven't done your research, I'm just saying that even with research there's still some common sense that should be used. That is not an insult.

 

Also all I see in Razzaa's videos is one game struggling to hit 30FPS and another struggling to do 50.

[SeanBond]

Can't you just disable the 500 mb of slower vram and fix any issues with the card on the spot? Would just make too much sense.. Or limit how much vram games can access?

dear god....seriously people still think this is an actual issue? Unless you are running terrible ports at 4k it's not going to be an issue even at 4k 95% of games will run fine, albiet really low fps just because the card can't possibly handle that resolution anyway. That extra .5gb does not actually cause stutter or problems. Don't bother disabling it. From what I understand most games will typically only draw from the 3.5gb anyway because they don't properly recognize the extra 500mb.