GTX 970 flaw

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DraginDime said:
To the 970 owners out there, If Nvidia would NOT have mislead/lied/cheated the specs of the card and just sold it as a GTX970 with 3.5GB of RAM for $330, would you still have bought it/considered it when compared to the current competition at that time?
Click to expand...
Nope. I was in the market for the GTX980 and a min vRAM of 4GB, but after the reviews and the specs I read the night before it went on sale I switched out the GTX980 I initially had in the cart for a GTX970 to save $200 at 7am. I thought a few extra shaders won't matter and if by some off chance I upgraded to 4K I could just SLI. Now it is clear that really isn't an option. The next card release I won't want anything less than 6GB that all runs at full speed. I don't want to have to read tech specs to find out that a manufacturer claiming 4GB of RAM is partitioned into fast and slow RAM. You claim 4GB all 4GB better run at the exact same speed. If you have fast and slow ram, then amount of ram on that card is equal ONLY to the max size of the fastest available. The rest I don't consider usable regardless of any claims that it's present on the board.
 
DraginDime said:
To the 970 owners out there, If Nvidia would NOT have mislead/lied/cheated the specs of the card and just sold it as a GTX970 with 3.5GB of RAM for $330, would you still have bought it/considered it when compared to the current competition at that time?
Click to expand...

Personally would have rather put the money out for a 980 if Nvidia was honest from the start.
 
Meeho said:
You don't have a good grasp of 970's memory problems, do you?
Click to expand...

http://www.hardwarepal.com/call-duty-advanced-warfare-benchmark-performance/

Here's a good breakdown of how COD:AW runs with a 970. And, the article is right, the game will consume as much VRAM as the card can provide. Whether it's actually using it is another story since there is no difference in usage between 1080 and 4K. Still plays smooth as butter either way. Poor console port code is most likely the reason. Plays smooth as butter with my 1GB cards at those settings 1080.

GL:HF
 
DraginDime said:
To the 970 owners out there, If Nvidia would NOT have mislead/lied/cheated the specs of the card and just sold it as a GTX970 with 3.5GB of RAM for $330, would you still have bought it/considered it when compared to the current competition at that time?
Click to expand...

No I would have bought used 780 ti sli for roughly the same price which is faster at 1080p surround and 1440p + dSR and AA. The extra vram, with lower temps and power was a good trade off, as well as getting a new card. I was lied to, period.
 
HydroBudz said:
http://www.hardwarepal.com/call-duty-advanced-warfare-benchmark-performance/

Here's a good breakdown of how COD:AW runs with a 970. And, the article is right, the game will consume as much VRAM as the card can provide. Whether it's actually using it is another story since there is no difference in usage between 1080 and 4K. Still plays smooth as butter either way. Poor console port code is most likely the reason. Plays smooth as butter with my 1GB cards at those settings 1080.

GL:HF
Click to expand...

Please.

AdvWarfare_2560x1440_PLOT_0.png


Explain to me why when both the 970 and 980 are getting well over 100 FPS at 1440p, the 970 still shows more spikes, and spikes of a greater magnitude when compared to the 980?

Source
 
n=1 said:
Please.

AdvWarfare_2560x1440_PLOT_0.png


Explain to me why when both the 970 and 980 are getting well over 100 FPS at 1440p, the 970 still shows more spikes, and spikes of a greater magnitude when compared to the 980?

Source
Click to expand...

And the game still plays buttery smooth. Explain that.

If you bothered to read the link I posted they even say it played smooth.
 
HydroBudz said:
http://www.hardwarepal.com/call-duty-advanced-warfare-benchmark-performance/

Here's a good breakdown of how COD:AW runs with a 970. And, the article is right, the game will consume as much VRAM as the card can provide. Whether it's actually using it is another story since there is no difference in usage between 1080 and 4K. Still plays smooth as butter either way. Poor console port code is most likely the reason. Plays smooth as butter with my 1GB cards at those settings 1080.

GL:HF
Click to expand...

So you don't understand the issue. Fewer words would have sufficed.



Bad news, it seems Nvidia is backpedaling on the refund stance and believes there is no problem:
olliej82 said:
I have an update and it's not good news! Just spoke to the retailer I bought my 2 msi gtx 970's from (not ocuk) and they said they have been in contact with nvidia whose official stance is no refunds as they see it as a non issue. In other words unless you have an evga card or one of the ocuk ones then you are stuck with it
Click to expand...



Peter Sierant, Senior Director of Customer Care at Nvidia edited his original post.

Original:
Hey,

First, I want you to know that I'm not just a mod, I work for NVIDIA in Santa Clara.

I totally get why so many people are upset. We messed up some of the stats on the reviewer kit and we didn't properly explain the memory architecture. I realize a lot of you guys rely on product reviews to make purchase decisions and we let you down.

It sucks because we're really proud of this thing. The GTX970 is an amazing card and I genuinely believe it's the best card for the money that you can buy. We're working on a driver update that will tune what's allocated where in memory to further improve performance.

Having said that, I understand that this whole experience might have turned you off to the card. If you don't want the card anymore you should return it and get a refund or exchange. If you have any problems getting that done, let me know and I'll do my best to help.

--Peter
Click to expand...

Updated:
Hey,

First, I want you to know that I'm not just a mod, I work for NVIDIA in Santa Clara.

The GTX 970 is an amazing card and I genuinely believe it's the best card for the money that you can buy. The GTX970 performs exactly as it was designed to, check out this Anandtech link which has a nice description of how the memory system works.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

Also, I understand that some of you are upset about the error in the reviewer guide. I apologize for that and can assure you that we have taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-specifications,28464.html

I realize that you may be looking for other options with your retailers and board manufacturers. If you need help, let me know.

UPDATE: Since there was some confusion, I updated this post to clarify my comments about drivers, other options and added some relative links.


--Peter
Click to expand...


Wow, Nvidia, just wow! :(
 
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HydroBudz said:
And the game still plays buttery smooth. Explain that.

If you bothered to read the link I posted they even say it played smooth.
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Because The Nile is a long river.

And that smooth comment was in regards to 1080p. PCPer tested this at 1440p. Apples to oranges.
 
n=1 said:
Because The Nile is a long river.
Click to expand...

Ahhh..so because COD:AW is poorly coded to consume as much VRAM as possible regardless of settings, regardless of card used, regardless of resolution, it's a problem with the 970.

You people.
 
n=1 said:
Because The Nile is a long river.

And that smooth comment was in regards to 1080p. PCPer tested this at 1440p. Apples to oranges.
Click to expand...

So did the article I linked to. 1080, 1440 and 4K.

Read, it does an attitude good.
 
Do you seriously not understand the significance of the frame time graph I posted above? This one?

AdvWarfare_2560x1440_PLOT_0.png
 
Hey guys I'm Nikolas the author of the article mentioned above.

You might want to look at the VRAM usage chart below that is at 3575MB. (Thats with the GTX970)

The smaller maps might not be that VRAM intensive but the game still runs below the 3584MB mark (normal 3.5GB ) for me on most maps. To go over that VRAM you need to push up supersampling @4K.

I retested on the new drivers (347.25) and its roughly the same usage.

Sometimes server lag gives you that crazy variance you are showing above. It happens quite often.

Also check a post on reddit I made about the 3.5GB and 3.5GB+ observations on GTX970(SLI) http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tuk1f/gtx970_35gb_vs_over_35gb_usage_and_stutter/
 
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I killed the forum lol

If anyone has any questions shoot and I will try to answer if possible.
 
EDIT: nevermind got ninja'd by author LOL

Was originally gonna say since if as you say the game is poorly coded to use as much vram as it can grab, perhaps Hardwarepal didn't really push against the vram wall even though it showed 3.5GB of usage. But anyway that's moot now.

HydroBudz said:
Ahhh..so because COD:AW is poorly coded to consume as much VRAM as possible regardless of settings, regardless of card used, regardless of resolution, it's a problem with the 970.

You people.
Click to expand...
 
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On the 970 driver update:
Hello,

I'm sorry that what I wrote was poorly worded, I realize I made it sound like there was a special patch or something and that is definitely not the case. We are always working on new drivers that tune performance and add features, the GTX 970 is no different.

Are you having a specific issue with the 970 that I can help you with? Unfortunately we made an error in the reviewer guide but the GTX 970 is one of the best GPU's we've ever built.
Click to expand...
 
n=1 said:
EDIT: nevermind got ninja'd by author LOL

Was originally gonna say since if as you say the vram is poorly coded to use as much vram as it can grab, perhaps Hardwarepal didn't really push against the vram wall even though it showed 3.5GB of usage. But anyway that's moot now.
Click to expand...

The internet is a brutal place :D j/k
 
Hmm... I think they should get sued, simply for a misrepresented product. I'm probably gonna be with my 780 SLI for a long time now, so I didn't jump onto this. I probably would have if I had waited a bit.

At the very least I hope they have lost a lot of trust with consumers.

Basically, the 4GB on the front of that box isn't actually true. You call something N units when it is N units of a homogeneous entity. If it is not, then that should be noted for (at the very least) accuracy. The reality here is that what you are getting is 3.5 GB + 500MB, with the latter being at drastically lower clock rates and quality. They're practically 2 different entities. What's worse is that the 4GB vram on an Nvidia card was a big selling point for this generation.

So that's seriously deceptive advertising. Regardless of whether it adds up to a sum of 4GB or not, that's a gross misrepresentation of the item.

If I had to make a similar analogy... um... I don't know let's see. Suppose you bought a vehicle with 24 (choosing numbers divisible by 8 for whatever reason cough) gallons advertised gas capacity. For you this is a big deal because, well, let's say that every other car out there with the form factor and price has a lower capacity and you really need that extra 3 gallons for what you do, to do it comfortably. For most people this won't actually be an issue because they refuel more often anyhow. Then when you drive it you find out that the last 3 gallons have a horribly diminished flow rate (or something) because they're in another tank with a crappy tube (I have no idea how the hell cars work because I'm not a mechanical engineer so don't shoot me). So you can't actually take the car above a certain limit--or it starts sputtering a bit or something--while driving it when needing to rely on the last X gallons because part of it is in your normal tank and the other part is in the smaller tank (this gets somewhat complicated because of fluid dynamics, so I'm not going to go into specifics). For most people this isn't a major enough concern... but should the car company get away with advertising 24 gallons capacity if it is not all the same quality?

Not that great at analogies but that's kind of where I place this. If everyone is allowed to make claims like this, let's take it to an extreme:
1TB SSD, but 768GB of it is actually running at 100MB/s while the rest is 500MB/s. They advertise 1TB capacity and 500MB/s transfer speeds.
 
ComputerBase.de results: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041393580&postcount=638



StoleMyOwnCar said:
Not that great at analogies but that's kind of where I place this. If everyone is allowed to make claims like this, let's take it to an extreme:
1TB SSD, but 768GB of it is actually running at 100MB/s while the rest is 500MB/s. They advertise 1TB capacity and 500MB/s transfer speeds.
Click to expand...

Except at no time could you get 500 MB/s read or write from any section, but only combined 450 MB/s read from the larger one and 50 MB/s write to the smaller one, or the other way around. But no writes/reads at full advertised rate.
 
mauros34 said:
Hey guys I'm Nikolas the author of the article mentioned above.

You might want to look at the VRAM usage chart below that is at 3575MB. (Thats with the GTX970)

The smaller maps might not be that VRAM intensive but the game still runs below the 3584MB mark (normal 3.5GB ) for me on most maps. To go over that VRAM you need to push up supersampling @4K.

I retested on the new drivers (347.25) and its roughly the same usage.

Sometimes server lag gives you that crazy variance you are showing above. It happens quite often.

Also check a post on reddit I made about the 3.5GB and 3.5GB+ observations on GTX970(SLI) http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tuk1f/gtx970_35gb_vs_over_35gb_usage_and_stutter/
Click to expand...

Have you tested with the 344.75 drivers since so many people are having a lot of issues with the 347.25 drivers?
 
HydroBudz said:
Have you tested with the 344.75 drivers since so many people are having a lot of issues with the 347.25 drivers?
Click to expand...

I've tested FC4, The Crew and Talos of what I see on my website with 344.75.

Talos isn't a VRAM hog. FC4 hits 3.5Gb at 4k High and over 4GB at Ultra, The Crew is also 3.5GB- For High and over 4GB for Ultra.
 
Well Gibbo over at OCUK is refunding KFA2/Galax and Evga users. I got 2xGTX970 Galax EXOCs probably going to trade in for store credit or 2xGTX980s.

Great CS from them and they are doing it out of their own pockets. Nvidia doesn't give a ****. They say its a non issue.
 
mauros34 said:
I've tested FC4, The Crew and Talos of what I see on my website with 344.75.

Talos isn't a VRAM hog. FC4 hits 3.5Gb at 4k High and over 4GB at Ultra, The Crew is also 3.5GB- For High and over 4GB for Ultra.
Click to expand...

Any major issues with those games and those drivers?
 
HydroBudz said:
Any major issues with those games and those drivers?
Click to expand...

FC4 is a mess to be honest 1 CPU core spiking to 100% is whats causing the stuttering most people are shouting about. Ultra is hitting a 4GB+ VRAM bottleneck.

The Crew is fine aslong as you run medium-high. On 4K Ultra again is a 4gb+ VRAM bottleneck.

Basically non issues under 3.5GB on just about any driver and game (minus FC4 and AC Unity thats garbage)
 
Meeho said:
ComputerBase.de results: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041393580&postcount=638





Except at no time could you get 500 MB/s read or write from any section, but only combined 450 MB/s read from the larger one and 50 MB/s write to the smaller one, or the other way around. But no writes/reads at full advertised rate.
Click to expand...

His point still stands though.

This next part isn't directed towards you Meeho.

Just this last Friday I decided to pull the trigger and buy a 970 off a forum member. This was before I ran across this thread. I did research looking at benchmarks, verified the 970 supported 4k etc... Yes, I also assumed the full 4GB VRAM was all the same running at the same "speeds". I am one of those enthusiasts buyers that isn't as well informed as others when it comes in depth details and specs on most hardware. I've gone through most of this thread and I'm rather surprised nVidia has consumers backing them. Even more so the reasoning behind it. 4GB VRAM, is 4GB VRAM and you're getting 4GB. I just can't understand how anyone is "okay" with that logic when the issue has been proven.

Yeah, I'm on the side of the fence that says this is not "okay". nVidia's reputation has taken a bit of a dive from me and I think nVidia should either allow returns/full refunds if wanted or at the very least refund some money back to customers that want to keep the card. Thing is, even for someone like me as I mentioned not being well versed on the detailed specs... I would have noticed looking at Newegg, or Tigerdirect etc, if the specifications said something about the splitting of the RAM into two speeds.

My stance being stated I will also say I'm a buyer that probably still would have bought this card from the [H] forum member. 3.5GB would have been okay for it's price range, imo. Plus I also didn't want to shell out $550+ for a 980, and while the 290x is an option I wanted something that ran cooler. The 970 still fits that bill and I still think by the time I'm ready to dive into "4k" the card will suit me well. Besides when I finally get there it'll probably be about time I get something better again.

My 2 cents... But I gotta say, this thread's been an interesting read.
 
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I think NV would have been better off just selling it as a 3.5GB card, and making it work that way, considering the .5GB is useless, and on top of that, some game engines have some smarts built in to utilize the ram based on what's available (EG BF3/4 Using more memory on the 7970 than it does on a GTX 680).
 
Meeho said:
ComputerBase.de results: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041393580&postcount=638





Except at no time could you get 500 MB/s read or write from any section, but only combined 450 MB/s read from the larger one and 50 MB/s write to the smaller one, or the other way around. But no writes/reads at full advertised rate.
Click to expand...

I guess that depends on how the memory is filled up and read from.... though I think you mixed up which one was smaller and which one was larger.
 
notarat said:
Well, in reality there isn't a memory issue. There is, however, a "false advertising" issue, as well as an "integrity" issue.
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An issue would imply it's not performing as designed.
It's performing exactly as designed.

Nvidia: "Working as intended".
 
The more I read about this the more it has pushed me over the tipping point. Between how they reacted to this and how they pushed aside the voltage issue I am done putting up with their anti-consumer attitude. These will be the last NVIDIA chips I purchase until something changes. Nothing would please me more than to see the AIB marketshare shift to 50/50 or beyond in the next year or two to show them that their customers won't just take it up the ass.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
I guess that depends on how the memory is filled up and read from.... though I think you mixed up which one was smaller and which one was larger.
Click to expand...

The larger portion is faster. The problem is they've advertised the card as having 224 GB/s 4 GB memory, when in fact it has a 196 GB/s 3.5 GB section and a 28 GB/s 0.5 GB one. It can only read or write to one of them at the same time, not to the whole 4 GB. If the game reads from the whole memory range, total combined bandwidth goes somewhere in between 28 and 196 and stutters appear because of the huge speed discrepancy between different memory sections.


TaintedSquirrel said:
An issue would imply it's not performing as designed.
It's performing exactly as designed.

Nvidia: "Working as intended".
Click to expand...

Yes, but not exactly as advertised.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Hmm... I think they should get sued, simply for a misrepresented product. I'm probably gonna be with my 780 SLI for a long time now, so I didn't jump onto this. I probably would have if I had waited a bit.

At the very least I hope they have lost a lot of trust with consumers.

Basically, the 4GB on the front of that box isn't actually true. You call something N units when it is N units of a homogeneous entity. If it is not, then that should be noted for (at the very least) accuracy. The reality here is that what you are getting is 3.5 GB + 500MB, with the latter being at drastically lower clock rates and quality. They're practically 2 different entities. What's worse is that the 4GB vram on an Nvidia card was a big selling point for this generation.

So that's seriously deceptive advertising. Regardless of whether it adds up to a sum of 4GB or not, that's a gross misrepresentation of the item.

If I had to make a similar analogy... um... I don't know let's see. Suppose you bought a vehicle with 24 (choosing numbers divisible by 8 for whatever reason cough) gallons advertised gas capacity. For you this is a big deal because, well, let's say that every other car out there with the form factor and price has a lower capacity and you really need that extra 3 gallons for what you do, to do it comfortably. For most people this won't actually be an issue because they refuel more often anyhow. Then when you drive it you find out that the last 3 gallons have a horribly diminished flow rate (or something) because they're in another tank with a crappy tube (I have no idea how the hell cars work because I'm not a mechanical engineer so don't shoot me). So you can't actually take the car above a certain limit--or it starts sputtering a bit or something--while driving it when needing to rely on the last X gallons because part of it is in your normal tank and the other part is in the smaller tank (this gets somewhat complicated because of fluid dynamics, so I'm not going to go into specifics). For most people this isn't a major enough concern... but should the car company get away with advertising 24 gallons capacity if it is not all the same quality?

Not that great at analogies but that's kind of where I place this. If everyone is allowed to make claims like this, let's take it to an extreme:
1TB SSD, but 768GB of it is actually running at 100MB/s while the rest is 500MB/s. They advertise 1TB capacity and 500MB/s transfer speeds.
Click to expand...

I always see in the specs that it says up to. They do not claim you will always get certain speeds.
 
wizzi01 said:
I always see in the specs that it says up to. They do not claim you will always get certain speeds.
Click to expand...

GTX 970 Reviewer's Guide: Specifications
970RG_575px.png


Official site
tWLGq7p.png


Where does it say up to 64 ROP units, up to 2048K L2 cache, up to 256-bit memory interface or up to 224 GB/s memory bandwidth?
 
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