NVidia CEO and President on GTX 970

[ivan134]

It solely depends on the game engine and how the game is being made. I tested a couple games with a 970 while it was in my possession: Metro Last Light and Watch Dogs.

Out of the two demanding titles, only Watch Dogs got up to 3.2Gb, sometimes 3.5Gb of Vram usage at 1080p. I don't think Metro even got into 3Gb at all.

I tested one game at the single step up DSR resolution (not 4k) that I can't remember off the top of my head, which was Watch Dogs. In my experience, the vram would go up to 3.6 and touch 3.8Gb of vram. Stutters were introduced for about 5 to 10 seconds and went away as the vram usage continued like it was. I would have liked to test that more, but the 970 was going in a system I was building for someone else.

So in my opinion based on the small tests that I did, the 970 shouldn't be giving any issues in those games at 1080p. At 1440p I am personally unsure.

I have my personal reasons why I don't buy NVIDIA, but I recommend their cards all the time and I hate seeing customers get screwed. I really hope that the games I mentioned this card to any problems trying to play them at 1440p.

[79wjd]

Um, yeah.

And why is that? The entire R7/9 200 series (excluding the 290/x) are rebranded HD7xxx cards. Yet that didn't seem to affect their sales.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Nvidia - Doesn't make apologize - you people beat them to death over it 
Nvidia - Does apologize - you people still beat them to death over it 
what did you expect , you want them to come to public and say we did that because we needed money ?  of course they do , they are a company who's main goal is to earn profit. 
EVEN if this was AMD , they wouldn't have come out and said to the public they lied , ofcoruse they would say, they misrepresented.  like what nvidia is doing right now .
they didn't exactly had to say anything , they already had gotten your money .

[kuddlesworth9419]

3.5GB is better then 3.0GB though. Unless what they are saying is bullshite. 

[Guest Kloaked]

I have my personal reasons why I don't buy NVIDIA, but I recommend their cards all the time and I hate seeing customers get screwed. I really hope that the games I mentioned this card to any problems trying to play them at 1440p.

Nobody got screwed, they got what they paid for.

[SteveGrabowski]

Because then it would be a 980.

970s are made out of the chips that physically can't be 980s due to manufacturing defects -- i.e. take a 980 where those few components don't work properly and then disable them and market it as a 970.

 

Or they're artificially cut down to keep from flooding the market with 980s and bringing the price of both the 970 and 980 down, just like with CPUs clocked to lower frequencies than they're capable of if yields are too good (for example, I know my Xeon has to have been downbinnned considering the really low core voltage and temperature it runs at).

[SteveGrabowski]

I think it's more a case of "well we can't have a cheaper card compete with the 980...turn these things off", not that they don't function properly.

 

Nothing wrong with that though. That's exactly what they do with CPUs, locking them to lower speeds than they're capable of to keep from flooding the market with high end parts and driving those prices down, as well as those of the lower end ones. It's the whole reason overclocking was born.

[SteveGrabowski]

How is that a profitable business strategy? If they were capable 980s then they would've been sold for $200 more as 980s.

 

It's a profitable strategy because it keeps the market from being flooded with GTX 980s, so that the 980 is better able to maintain its high price.

[SteveGrabowski]

If they were able to produce more 980's they would have been able to sell them cheaper because the yield would have been a lot higher. You dont gimp good silicone to sell at a cheaper price.

 

You do that all the time with CPUs at least. I don't know how good Nvidia's yields are, but why do you think overclocking started becoming big with CPUs? Because Intel's yields were getting so good that they were producing lots more high end CPUs than they wanted on the market, so they downclocked them to lower multipliers. I remember 15 years ago when everyone was concerned with which stepping they'd get knowing that some had better yields than others, specifically because they knew there was a better chance they'd get a CPU that tested higher but had been downbinned to something lower.

[Misanthrope]

As opposed to selling a broken product (which is essentially what you're saying they are doing), lying about it, and pissing off a good portion of the customer base.

I still see apologists here so not big enough

[Razzaa]

It's a profitable strategy because it keeps the market from being flooded with GTX 980s, so that the 980 is better able to maintain its high price.

If the yields were better, it would be more profitable to sell the 980 cheaper. It costs time and money to cut them down. It wouldnt make sense financially to purposely gimp a perfect working chip.

[ThomasD]

And why is that? The entire R7/9 200 series (excluding the 290/x) are rebranded HD7xxx cards. Yet that didn't seem to affect their sales.

All of which proves nothing, and certainly is not specific to this matter.

 

Maybe you do not understand how marketing works, or what facts it reliably establishes.  Here goes.

 

Responsible and successful companies engage in marketing to sell their products.

 

They do not do it on a whim, or haphazardly, because it costs them time and money.

 

So, while marketing may contain all sorts of information, there is one thing that it most reliably communicates.

 

It tells us exactly what the seller thinks is most important to the potential customer.

 

It is exactly what they think will turn a potential buyer into an actual buyer.

 

It may not be truthful (the seller could be mistaken, or lying)

 

And it may not be accurate (the consumers may actually be more concerned with hearing other things)

 

But it always tells us what the seller is thinking.

 

And clearly, in this instance the seller was very hot on potential customers thinking that they were getting memory equivalent to a 980.

 

Again, they did not do this by accident, or on a whim, it was central to all of their marketing.

 

Maybe that doesn't matter to you, and maybe it doesn't matter to any potential buyers now, but it mattered then otherwise they would not have done it.

[bogus]

Now this is what I call a late response.

A useless response still, but at least is something - most likely due to the lawsuits. He basicly said that on the NVIDIA side, 4GB VRAM is marketing, even in the face of the game demand, so they just managed to have a cheap solution to claim that the 970 has 4 GB of VRAM. Yeah - it's a feature now LOL!

Mr. Jen only missed the ":_(" smile after the "We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time." and before the "We will still keep the money for the customers who were mislead by us into purchasing this card".... oh wait, he didn't wrote that last part!

PS.: NVIDIA white knights rejoyce of this kind words of someone who commited fraud and didn't return the money for the ones he fooled. Your random posts claiming this topic will derail in the same bashing are just has usefull as this blog post.

[SteveGrabowski]

If the yields were better, it would be more profitable to sell the 980 cheaper. It costs time and money to cut them down. It wouldnt make sense financially to purposely gimp a perfect working chip.

 

Intel and AMD have been doing this for 20 years man. I thought people knew this. I honestly don't think it would be more profitable to sell 980s cheaper. Because 970s would become cheaper too. Right now they have midlevel buyers willing to go up from the normal $250 sweet spot to $330 because the 970 is such a great performer and they still have highend buyers willing to shell out $550-$700 for 980s.

[SteveGrabowski]

Anyways, I have no problems with the Nvidia engineering, and have no problem if they're cutting down working 980s for 970s. I'd much rather have the 3.5GB of fast memory as opposed to only 3.0GB. 

[Razzaa]

Intel and AMD have been doing this for 20 years man. I thought people knew this.

Really? So they dont get any defects and they have perfect yield and just gimp them because why the hell not? Proof?

[ThomasD]

Intel and AMD have been doing this for 20 years man. I thought people knew this.

Yes, and what else people don't seem to understand is that it is the gimped versions of the chip that often amount to the bulk of total sales.

 

Effectively all those people who buy the (few actual) defective binned chip plus the purposefully gimped once are the financing mechanism for the smaller market of top of the line purchases.  If it was just top of the line and the very small amount of actual defective chips that comprised a given run then the economics of a production run would usually not be supportable.

 

Which is why high sales levels and price point are so important for the mid-level items (just like everyone pimps the i5's)

[SteveGrabowski]

Really? So they dont get any defects and they have perfect yield and just gimp them because why the hell not? Proof?

 

Why do you think you could overclock Celerons and Pentium III's to so much higher than their stock clocks way back in the day? Why would you even have overclocking if chips were sold at the speeds they actually tested at?

[SteveGrabowski]

Yes, and what else people don't seem to understand is that it is the gimped versions of the chip that often amount to the bulk of total sales.

 

Effectively all those people who buy the (few actual) defective binned chip plus the purposefully gimped once are the financing mechanism for the smaller market of top of the line purchases.  If it was just top of the line and the very small amount of actual defective chips that comprised a given run then the economics of a production run would usually not be supportable.

 

Which is why high sales levels and price point are so important for the mid-level items (just like everyone pimps the i5's)

 

Yep, if the market gets flooded with cheap i7-4790k's, then who is buying the i5-4590 when the i7-4790k drops in price? And then the i5-4590 has to drop too from lowered demand and you have this domino effect where who wants the i3-4160 when the i5-4590 has gone down so much? And so on.

[Razzaa]

Why do you think you could overclock Celerons and Pentium III's to so much higher than their stock clocks way back in the day? Why would you even have overclocking if chips were sold at the speeds they actually tested at?

Because you are pushing them past the normal operating limits. 

[Razzaa]

Yep, if the market gets flooded with cheap i7-4790k's, then who is buying the i5-4590 when the i7-4790k drops in price? And then the i5-4590 has to drop too from lowered demand and you have this domino effect where who wants the i3-4160 when the i5-4590 has gone down so much? And so on.

If you had cheaper i7's the i5 and i3 wouldn't need to exist in the first place. They only exist because of defects.................done arguing, as we are way off topic. If you can show me proof they get great yields and gimp down on purpose i will happily admit defeat.

[SteveGrabowski]

Because you are pushing them past the normal operating limits. 

 

But you weren't. The temperatures and voltages were perfectly normal in comparison to the highend chips that came with those same speeds out the box.

[kacper]

This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.

We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.

I really can't believe they called it a feature...

[MageTank]

Why not just....not...do that?

 

Fair enough, but that still doesn't explain how this is a "feature" that "makes it possible for the 970 to have 4gb rather than 3"

 

This is a "feature" because they were not able to do this on previous cards. They were not able to just shut down part of the ROPs and cache like this, and some people even consider it a feat in doing so. Those cards you mentioned, about the 770 and 780's having more than 4gb of memory, while they do HAVE the memory, do you honestly think they have the bandwidth to support that memory? I often consider 4gb 770's to be pushing it, but to go higher than that would be obnoxious to me.

 

I believe the current 970's are just 980's that did not make the cut, and were cut down to a standard that all sub-par 980's could achieve, and be rebranded as a 970. This tends to happen a lot. Remember the GTX 465's? Yeah... this has happened before and will continue to happen. Regardless of what people think, they did get the right performance for their dollar. Their anger and frustration come from the fact that this information was not disclosed prior to their purchase of these cards. 

 

Do i agree with Jen-Hsun's calling this a feature? Not really. However, it is a "feature" in the literal definition of the word as a noun. I just would not consider this a marketable feature. You cannot put a spin on this and try to sell it to people as if it will benefit them, which is why i do not consider it a "feature" in the literal sense of the verb. A verbal feature would require some sort of prominent value, where i do not see this as such. 

 

Either way, you get what you pay for, and you get a whole hell of a lot from the GTX 970. More than what you would get paying the exact same price from a GTX 770. I would still buy one if i had the extra cash on hand, but i guess it all becomes a matter of opinion on subjects such as this. 

[ThomasD]

If you had cheaper i7's the i5 and i3 wouldn't need to exist in the first place. They only exist because of defects.................done arguing, as we are way off topic. If you can show me proof they get great yields and gimp down on purpose i will happily admit defeat.

That is one Hell of a defect rate.  Someone might want to look into getting new production engineers...

 

More seriously - 

 

Consider what it costs to set up and operate production of any given die/chip set?

 

Now, having sunk your costs, what is the marginal cost of making one more chip (or a few thousand more) that you intend to gimp in order to capture sales at a lower price point?

 

And given the opportunity to do that how in the world could you justify the massive fixed costs of setting up an entire, separate operation in order to produce nothing but low priced chips?

 

It is much like the way cruise lines upgrade people into higher priced cabins in order to re-sell the mid price cabins.  Fixed costs, being well, fixed.