Petitioning for 970 Refund

Rock_Lobstah said:
I think at the end of the day, Nvidia realized the 970, at its original and thought-to-be specs, was going to cannibalize the over-priced 980. So, either lower the price of the 980 or gimp the 970. Pretty obvious which route they took.
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That's the thing that fucking gets me. If they would've just been upfront about this design, and honest with the specs in the first place, many of us would've passed on the 970 and bought the more expensive 980 instead.

If only they had advertised it honestly as a 3GB card with 1GB cache, many might have seen that as an added "feature" for a reasonably priced 3GB card, while others would've just sprung the extra cash for the full-speed 4GB 980 instead.

It's just such an unbelievably stupid thing they've done, for many reasons.
 
AFD said:
That's the thing that fucking gets me. If they would've just been upfront about this design, and honest with the specs in the first place, many of us would've passed on the 970 and bought the more expensive 980 instead.

If only they had advertised it honestly as a 3GB card with 1GB cache, many might have seen that as an added "feature" for a reasonably priced 3GB card, while others would've just sprung the extra cash for the full-speed 4GB 980 instead.

It's just such an unbelievably stupid thing they've done, for many reasons.
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Absolutely true, and the card is still good, its just they need to be honest with people.
 
Nvidia never marketed the ROP's or L2 cache. It's no where to be found on a box or resellers site. So to say Nvidia lied to you, the consumer, is false. They lied to the reviewers whom they provided those specs to. Reviewers are not marketing these cards or reselling them.

The card does have 4GB of VRAM. And all of it is usable, albeit the final 512MB being slower.

That's why the class action suit will fail.
 
HydroBudz said:
Nvidia never marketed the ROP's or L2 cache. It's no where to be found on a box or resellers site. So to say Nvidia lied to you, the consumer, is false. They lied to the reviewers whom they provided those specs to. Reviewers are not marketing these cards or reselling them.

The card does have 4GB of VRAM. And all of it is usable, albeit the final 512MB being slower.

That's why the class action suit will fail.
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I read the lawsuit. It's actually very well reasoned. Your analysis fails to answer several of the specific claims that were brought up.

Most likely Nvidia will end up settling this, and all GTX 970 owners will get $10 or a free gumball or something.
 
The reason this lawsuit will win is actually simple, Nvidia themselves have already officially stated that the memory is segmented and runs at a different speeds. By providing no additional information in their specifications that the memory was segmented in this manner, they went against pretty much all established conventions that the memory amount listed runs at the same speed for the entire amount listed. Just like CPUs can't say they just have X MB of cache memory if it is broken down into multiple levels of differing speeds. That's why all the specs specifically state L1 and L2 cache as separate entities because it is partitioned by a characteristic difference.

The false advertising claim is easy to prove as all the official specs list it as having a fixed bandwidth. Since no partitioning information was given it is more than reasonable that all buyers assumed that that the bandwidth listed applied to the whole memory range not just a first 3.5GB of it.

The statement by the CEO is just them trying to limit the losses they will face for not correcting this in a reasonable time frame. Regardless of whether or not you believe their claim of " a simple miscommunication", they mislead the buyers for more than a full fiscal quarter where they were profiting from the error. There is very little they can do but settle this out of court cause IMHO they will lose as there is precedence in other industries where similar false/misleading claims caused recalls and/or fixes needing to be implemented. Think how every car manufacturer must state specifically the Mile Per Gallon rating of the vehicle in Highway verses other scenarios, because stop and go traffic is significantly different than Highway mileage ratings.
 
LurkerLito said:
The reason this lawsuit will win is actually simple, Nvidia themselves have already officially stated that the memory is segmented and runs at a different speeds. By providing no additional information in their specifications that the memory was segmented in this manner, they went against pretty much all established conventions that the memory amount listed runs at the same speed for the entire amount listed.

The false advertising claim is easy to prove as all the official specs list it as having a fixed bandwidth. Since no partitioning information was given it is more than reasonable that all buyers assumed that that the bandwidth listed applied to the whole memory range not just a first 3.5GB of it.
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Absolutely true and reasonable. If they don't, nothing's to stop a future graphics card maker from stating it has 16GB of RAM and leaving out only 1GB is at full speed, the rest is at 1/8th speed!!!
 
Zinn said:
I read the lawsuit. It's actually very well reasoned. Your analysis fails to answer several of the specific claims that were brought up.

Most likely Nvidia will end up settling this, and all GTX 970 owners will get $10 or a free gumball or something.
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I suppose we'll see in 2-3 years. lol
 
To quote

"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."

Not even an explicit, "hey sorry, we really f*cked up."

I'm not a fan of team red or team green, but my R9 290X doesn't have a problem using 4GB of VRAM. I'm just gonna have to do some real hard core testing now between my twin R9 290X rig vesus twin 970 rig and see what is up, now that I've got them built. DSR versus VSR, or just pull out my 4k screen.

So sad. As a Canadian I can't participate in this lawsuit but I hope something does happen. North America is so much of a "corporate fascist" continent that it would be nice to see consumers actually get something, and not just a bunch of liars, I mean, lawyers.
 
TheHobbyist said:
This is important to you guys huh?

The performance is the same as it was in the reviews that came out.

Isn't this really just a matter of technical minutia?

The only scenario where this can possible effect an owner would be in a game that doesn't exist yet from what I have seen.

NVIDIA was able to reduce the cost of production of the 970 by doing this, and surely that lower price point than typical was welcomed?

I'm disappointed it happened, but I do not feel deceived or lied to.

You guys feel slighted and are pretty burnt about it?
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I rememeber in the amd s939 days I bought a motherboard from Abit that advertised it's chipset would run x2 cpus. and when the cpu's launched...... it didn't support it after all. I was pretty pissed.


Funny video here btw
 
Zinn said:
I read the lawsuit. It's actually very well reasoned. Your analysis fails to answer several of the specific claims that were brought up.

Most likely Nvidia will end up settling this, and all GTX 970 owners will get $10 or a free gumball or something.
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Yep they were very specific about their allegations.

NATURE OF THE ACTION
4.This is a nationwide class action brought on behalf of all consumers who purchased graphics or video card devices incorporating the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics processing units (“GPU”) (hereinafter “GTX 970” or “GTX 970 devices”), which were sold based on the misleading representation that the GTX 970 operates with a full 4GB of VRAM at GDDR5 (not a less performant 3.5 GB with a less performant and decoupled .5 GB spillover), 64 ROPs (as opposed to 56 ROPs), and an L2 cache capacity of 2048KB (as opposed to 1792 KB), or omitted material facts to the contrary.
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And this is what Jen Hsun wrote in the blog:

GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.
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Seems like to me he basically just shot himself in the foot lol. I mean he admits that the 512MB portion is segmented ("spillover"), and that it has reduced bandwidth ("less performant"). I'm guessing the defense will involve battling over semantics in court...
 
lee0539 said:
If I'm not mistaken people on gtx 780 at 3 gb don't have those issues with shadow of modor because it is a fixed 3 g
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The reason us 780 owners don't have the same issues isn't because we're locked at 3GB, it's because we don't force it to 4K resolution with increasing amounts of AA and textures until it shits the bed :rolleyes:

Guarantee that if I was bored enough I could push my 780 to the point where it started to stutter. Maybe I should and then whip the board up into a frenzy about why my 780 isn't performing on equal footing as a 780ti.

One thing I can't understand is why my 384bit memory bus 780 doesn't have 384 GB/sec memory bandwidth. I keep reading some of you arguing that 256bit memory buses should result in 1:1 256 GB/sec memory bandwidth. Surely there is a defect in my card...or maybe it's my 48 ROPs, which is strange given that my memory bandwidth is 288 GB/sec far faster than the 970 with more ROPs :confused:

Starrbuck said:
Absolutely true and reasonable. If they don't, nothing's to stop a future graphics card maker from stating it has 16GB of RAM and leaving out only 1GB is at full speed, the rest is at 1/8th speed!!!
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Nothing to stop them but those ever-watchful hardware reviewers who will inform curious consumers that the card is a worthless POS.

n=1 said:
Seems like to me he basically just shot himself in the foot lol. I mean he admits that the 512MB portion is segmented ("spillover"), and that it has reduced bandwidth ("less performant"). I'm guessing the defense will involve battling over semantics in court...
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Unfortunately for people believing this lawsuit has a snowball's chance in hell, courts don't take too kindly to false assumptions. Simply because one wrongly infers that the 4GB memory operates under the hood in a specific way, so long as nVidia didn't explicitly state that to be the case, they're in the clear.

They could even slap 1GB DDR3 in along with 3GB DDR5 and call it "4GB DDR" and be perfectly legal.
 
HydroBudz said:
Nvidia never marketed the ROP's or L2 cache. It's no where to be found on a box or resellers site. So to say Nvidia lied to you, the consumer, is false. They lied to the reviewers whom they provided those specs to. Reviewers are not marketing these cards or reselling them.
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And why exactly do you think Nvidia provided the specs to reviewers? For their own personal bedtime reading material? The info was given to reviewers for the express purpose of being passed on to the general public. Therefore, false advertising. No question about it.
 
Creig said:
And why exactly do you think Nvidia provided the specs to reviewers? For their own personal bedtime reading material? The info was given to reviewers for the express purpose of being passed on to the general public. Therefore, false advertising. No question about it.
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It doesn't matter what their intention was; "advertising" has a very precise meaning in the law.
 
Creig said:
And why exactly do you think Nvidia provided the specs to reviewers? For their own personal bedtime reading material? The info was given to reviewers for the express purpose of being passed on to the general public. Therefore, false advertising. No question about it.
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Agreed! And this is the problem. Reviewers were given the info from Nvidia and that same info was passed to the consumer. The question in a court of law would then be if that chain of information is expected and the norm and therefore constitutes a reasonable expectation from the end user= consumer. I think it is obvious that reviewers are a resource for a great deal of consumers so therefore Nvidias omitted information whether intentional or not places a great deal of liability at their front door.
 
jwcalla said:
It doesn't matter what their intention was; "advertising" has a very precise meaning in the law.
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Notice given in a manner designed to attract public attention; information communicated to the public, or to an individual concerned, by means of handbills or the newspaper.

Law Dictionary: What is ADVERTISEMENT? definition of ADVERTISEMENT (Black's Law Dictionary)
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Therefore, it was false advertising.
 
I just hope that people don't shoot themselves in their foot with this petition (and possible lawsuit). We only have two dedicated GPU manufacturers, just remember that.
 
gnawrot said:
I just hope that people don't shoot themselves in their foot with this petition (and possible lawsuit). We only have two dedicated GPU manufacturers, just remember that.
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You think this is going to hurt Nvidia in any long term sense or do you think they will act like a bad girlfriend and stop giving us GPUs out of spite? Come on dude think that shit through... :rolleyes:
 
mope54 said:
Unfortunately for people believing this lawsuit has a snowball's chance in hell, courts don't take too kindly to false assumptions. Simply because one wrongly infers that the 4GB memory operates under the hood in a specific way, so long as nVidia didn't explicitly state that to be the case, they're in the clear.

They could even slap 1GB DDR3 in along with 3GB DDR5 and call it "4GB DDR" and be perfectly legal.
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See now this becomes a slippery slope, because where do you draw the line then? What if they sold a 2GB GDDR5 +2GB DDR3 card? Or even a 1+3GB card?

All I'm saying is that reasonable assumptions based on the norm shouldn't be summarily dismissed. Because hell, we could apply that argument to every commodity on the market and we as consumers would be totally screwed.

I'd be inclined to agree with you if nVidia had a history of running asymmetric memory config like this, but as at least for the past few years, only the GTX 660 and 660 Ti had this segmented memory thing, and in both cases nVidia disclosed this at launch. If anything, they set their own precedent, so not disclosing 970's memory segmentation at launch really doesn't work to their favor.
 
But they didn't. There is 4GB of DDR5 on the card. They didn't advertise how it would perform, so people are free to assume whatever they want. Reasonable assumptions are hard to prove since everyone will have a different reasonable assumption.
 
Case in point, my reasonable assumption was that it couldn't possibly be the same as the 980...because it was not a 980. I posted before the 970 was released and also shortly after release that there was some catch somewhere and that people better test it up and down, left and right, because how could it possibly be half the price of the 780 (and 980) yet deliver better performance cut and dry.

Hence why I kept my 780.

Completely baffled by people posting here now that they assumed it was identical to the 980. What did you think were the differences then?

durquavian said:
Then given they say a 4Gb card, what should that mean reasonably?
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It means that you read the reviews and see how it performs? No one thought it was the same as AMD 4GB cards, right?
 
mope54 said:
Case in point, my reasonable assumption was that it couldn't possibly be the same as the 980...because it was not a 980. I posted before the 970 was released and also shortly after release that there was some catch somewhere and that people better test it up and down, left and right, because how could it possibly be half the price of the 780 (and 980) yet deliver better performance cut and dry.

Hence why I kept my 780.

Completely baffled by people posting here now that they assumed it was identical to the 980. What did you think were the differences then?


It means that you read the reviews and see how it performs? No one thought it was the same as AMD 4GB cards, right?
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Your reasonable assumption was based on the belief from the start that Nvidia was trying to short-sell you somehow, whereas the reasonable assumption stated above was to take a company at its word and to go by a previously consistent practice by the company and the industry.

Even if you're right (we should have been suspicious for whatever reason) it doesn't erase the fact that Nvidia then acted in bad faith, practicing deception and refusing to acknowledge it.
 
noobthegreat said:
Your reasonable assumption was based on the belief from the start that Nvidia was trying to short-sell you somehow, whereas the reasonable assumption stated above was to take a company at its word and to go by a previously consistent practice by the company and the industry.

Even if you're right (we should have been suspicious for whatever reason) it doesn't erase the fact that Nvidia then acted in bad faith, practicing deception and refusing to acknowledge it.
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well wait for the court's decision

I'm sure it will be hilarious watching a petitioner argue that they were too stupid to consider that the 980 and 970 couldn't possibly be the same because...they aren't the same.
 
Yeah, I suppose we don't see eye to eye here.

It's too bad that, ultimately, and in spite of any lawsuit, we'll see Nvidia come out with something attractive months from now and all this will be forgotten. Hell, I might even buy two.
 
mope54 said:
well wait for the court's decision

I'm sure it will be hilarious watching a petitioner argue that they were too stupid to consider that the 980 and 970 couldn't possibly be the same because...they aren't the same.
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No they aren't the same, and they do indeed have a different core config as well as clock speeds. That much is known and explicitly stated, and would indeed be your own fault if you assumed othewise.

However, based on past precedence (at least in the past 6 years), the reasonable assumption is that if there was something different about the memory subsystem, it would either be stated in the official specs (different memory bus width), or communicated at launch (memory segmentation in the 660 and 660 Ti). Neither of that happened in the case of the 970.

But yes you're right ultimately it will be up to the court to determine to what is reasonable and what isn't.
 
HydroBudz said:
But they didn't. There is 4GB of DDR5 on the card. They didn't advertise how it would perform, so people are free to assume whatever they want. Reasonable assumptions are hard to prove since everyone will have a different reasonable assumption.
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And what about the incorrect ROPs and L2 cache figures? Even if lawyers can't convince a judge that the 4GB of memory doesn't function in a typical fashion, the number of ROPs and amount of L2 cache will still be enough to ensure a win for the plaintiff.

Nvidia will either lose this case or settle out of court. There are no other possible outcomes.
 
It could just be the beginning. Of course in t won't have a huge impact overall on NVIDIAs bottom line by hopefully set the bar for future releases.
 
Creig said:
And what about the incorrect ROPs and L2 cache figures? Even if lawyers can't convince a judge that the 4GB of memory doesn't function in a typical fashion, the number of ROPs and amount of L2 cache will still be enough to ensure a win for the plaintiff.

Nvidia will either lose this case or settle out of court. There are no other possible outcomes.
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Do you have a 970 box? I would like to see a screenshot of the side panel.

Various people in this thread who actually own a 970 have claimed that those specs aren't on the side panel. If it's true that only reviewers, or retailers, listed those specs that's not on nVidia.
 
mope54 said:
Do you have a 970 box? I would like to see a screenshot of the side panel.

Various people in this thread who actually own a 970 have claimed that those specs aren't on the side panel. If it's true that only reviewers, or retailers, listed those specs that's not on nVidia.
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I will look at my Strix 970 box later when I get home.
 
mope54 said:
Do you have a 970 box? I would like to see a screenshot of the side panel.

Various people in this thread who actually own a 970 have claimed that those specs aren't on the side panel. If it's true that only reviewers, or retailers, listed those specs that's not on nVidia.
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So now we're right back to:

xorbe said:
So reviewers got the info ... from ...
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...? Which was never really answered.
 
mope54 said:
Do you have a 970 box? I would like to see a screenshot of the side panel.

Various people in this thread who actually own a 970 have claimed that those specs aren't on the side panel. If it's true that only reviewers, or retailers, listed those specs that's not on nVidia.
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Are you being deliberately obtuse? The information came directly from NVIDIA themselves in their Nvidia Reviewers Guide. That information, specifically meant for public dissemination, was included in dozens of online GTX970 review articles.

If the best defense Nvidia can come up with for releasing inaccurate specs is, "But your Honor! It wasn't on the box!" then Nvidia may as well just break out their checkbook right here and now.
 
Definitely the next time I buy a gpu, I'll make sure 4gb means 4gb full speed (or any other memory size) not 3.5 full and .5 reduced. How would I make sure? Not a clue! lol. I'll have to trust the manufacturer. :(
This is like the passing of Obamacare. 1st pass it, then find out what's REALLY in it. :eek:
 
Creig said:
Are you being deliberately obtuse? The information came directly from NVIDIA themselves in their Nvidia Reviewers Guide. That information, specifically meant for public dissemination, was included in dozens of online GTX970 review articles.

If the best defense Nvidia can come up with for releasing inaccurate specs is, "But your Honor! It wasn't on the box!" then Nvidia may as well just break out their checkbook right here and now.
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Hahaha this is one of the best responses to that garbage argument people are peddling.
Thank you for this post!
 
mope54 said:
I'm sure it will be hilarious watching a petitioner argue that they were too stupid to consider that the 980 and 970 couldn't possibly be the same because...they aren't the same.
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I love how you continuously misinterpret everyone's statements, and in the same breath deliver an underhanded insult just shy of being a personal attack per rule 1.. classy.

Please don't get this topic shutdown again, thanks.
 
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