GTX 970 flaw

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Yeah, there's quite a big discussion going on at OCN right now because of it's recent publicity.

Stinks...as I have a 970!
 
Was going to buy one with tax money but between the complaints of coil whine and this, I think I'll hold off.
 
I would have still purchased the card if it came with 3.5GB of RAM. So while it will be interesting to see where this goes, it really hasn't affected my gameplay, or reviewers gameplay.
 
If this is 100% confirmed as a design flaw then they need to start replacing cards.
 
Haven't noticed this issue with my 970s, and I run at 1440p with DSR too. If it is a design flaw, I hope they fix it anyway.
 
Been reading this on G3D and Geforce forums. looks like they are working hard on this to solve the issue!
 
I always had a feeling that there was a catch with 970's for being much cheaper than the 980's.

this also means that NVidia always knew about it.

I am glad that I paid more for the 980.
 
MavericK96 said:
If this is 100% confirmed as a design flaw then they need to start replacing cards.
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good luck with that, NVidia will get away with it because they advertised the card with less cores than the 980.

that is all they need to win the case against the consumers.
 
If the 970 was an AMD card, they would have marketed it as 3.5 GB or 3.3 GB, not 4.
As bad as AMD can be, at least they aren't liars.
 
So as it turns out, the 970 can access 3.5 gb at full speed and the other 500 mb at a reduced speed if it needs it. This is the reason why programs such as Afterburner seem to stop at 3.5 gb when reporting allocated not actual memory being used.

A program from some unknown called Nai has appeared and is making the issue appear to be worse than it is when run. Reality is that in real world gaming, it's been proven to have almost a negligible effect on fps which was confirmed by plenty of owners before Nvidia said a word.

AMD's social media team however is doing a great job at OCN and other forums making this issue look many times worse than it really is.
 
Seems like straight-up false advertising to me. If only 3.5 GB is actually realistically usable, then it's not really a 4 GB card, is it?
 
Valtiel said:
AMD's social media team however is doing a great job at OCN and other forums making this issue look many times worse than it really is.
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It's the panic and insecurity of the consumerbase.
Everybody loves a good controversy. Blow things out of proportion to get people riled up and clicking shitty articles for easy page views.

Nvidia's PR team are the ones you should really feel sorry for.
They're working over-time this weekend on something that shouldn't require it.

AMD doesn't really have enough money or a dedicated fanbase to pull off a stunt like this. People have to actually like AMD to go this far out of their way.
 
Well, they don't really prove anything with an average framerate. The issue is stuttering and frametimes.

Need a third party site to run FCAT benchmarks before it's determined if it's a big deal or not.

Although Nvidia admitting to this is kinda shooting themselves in the foot, would make them very open to a class action lawsuit.
 
Valtiel said:
So as it turns out, the 970 can access 3.5 gb at full speed and the other 500 mb at a reduced speed if it needs it. This is the reason why programs such as Afterburner seem to stop at 3.5 gb when reporting allocated not actual memory being used.

A program from some unknown called Nai has appeared and is making the issue appear to be worse than it is when run. Reality is that in real world gaming, it's been proven to have almost a negligible effect on fps which was confirmed by plenty of owners before Nvidia said a word.

AMD's social media team however is doing a great job at OCN and other forums making this issue look many times worse than it really is.
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It causes stutter in SLI configurations, its a real issue. The stutter of the 970's vs the 980's in SLI has always been apparent, it is only now that the real cause is known.
 
AceCR42 said:
Well, they don't really prove anything with an average framerate. The issue is stuttering and frametimes.

Need a third party site to run FCAT benchmarks before it's determined if it's a big deal or not.

Although Nvidia admitting to this is kinda shooting themselves in the foot, would make them very open to a class action lawsuit.
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Kyle should do some testing, the same as he did with AMD when they were having frame pacing issues.

It was a really good test with factual data that actually helped AMD in the end.
 
Personally I'm not really affected because 970 doesn't have horsepower to reach 60+ fps at settings which require >3,5GB but still it's dishonest advertising so apology and some token of good will (like voucher for Batman or some other game) would be nice.

TaintedSquirrel said:
If the 970 was an AMD card, they would have marketed it as 3.5 GB or 3.3 GB, not 4.
As bad as AMD can be, at least they aren't liars.
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More likely they would market it as up to 4GB of ram considering they did the same for 290/290X clockspeeds.
 
FWIW when I was running Watch Dogs at 1.78 DSR (1440p downsampled) on my 970 SLI, vram usage could peak at 3.8GB according to HWInfo64, yet I've never experienced the vram swap stuttering issues that people have been reporting... (the stutters I did experience came bundled with the game :rolleyes:)
 
I have a 970 I haven't put in my rig yet. I have a 1440p and a 1080p surround can anyone tell me a good test to replicate this issue?

Maybe this is why they haven't put out 8gb versions
 
Tgrove said:
I have a 970 I haven't put in my rig yet. I have a 1440p and a 1080p surround can anyone tell me a good test to replicate this issue?

Maybe this is why they haven't put out 8gb versions
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Just play your games. If you try hard enough, you will find the issue.
 
It's cheap for a reason. I'm already struggling with terrible coil whine on this 3rd RMA, and now they're telling me it's effectively a 3.5gb card.
 
ocellaris said:
I would have still purchased the card if it came with 3.5GB of RAM. So while it will be interesting to see where this goes, it really hasn't affected my gameplay, or reviewers gameplay.
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This is how I'd feel if I had a 970. Honestly I hope people make a stink so nVidia knows it's not ok to be dickbags. I don't see how people can glorify AMD though. Their crossfire being worse than a single card for years is worse to me IMO.
 
ocellaris said:
Apparently people think the last 512MB of VRAM being slower than the first 3.5GB is class action worthy :p
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Well, yeah, it's called false advertising. In other forums many 970 owners are pretty pissed off.

If they could sue the Killzone devs for the technically-not-1080p issue, what makes you think someone won't try over this?
 
I guess I'm kind of confused.

The performance people are experiencing is the same as the benchmarked performance in all of the reviews they read before buying the card.

What exactly are they "not getting" that they paid for?
 
jwcalla said:
I guess I'm kind of confused.

The performance people are experiencing is the same as the benchmarked performance in all of the reviews they read before buying the card.

What exactly are they "not getting" that they paid for?
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I think the majority of games don't use over 3.5GB so it may not have been visible on benchmarks but if you did go over supposively your FPS goes to hell. Technically they have 4GB but the last 0.5 is essentially useless it's so slow. Probably matters more for SLI and such. I don't think I've seen my 980 go over 3.3 real world usage.
 
From what I saw over at the Guru3d forums, I think people started getting suspicious when they were comparing a game between the 970 and 980 at identical settings. The 980 was able to use most of its RAM (like 3.8+) while the 970, at identical game settings, was keen at staying under 3.5GB usage. Then that Nai guy at a German forum whipped up that CUDA memory test to expose the issue.

After today's news it is pretty apparent that nVidia knew all along and had a driver workaround in place to avoid using the last chunk of memory. I understand why they need to sell a cut-down product, but the limitation should have been disclosed at launch. As it stands, that last chunk of memory on the 970 is basically useless for high performance gaming.
 
Damn this shit is just crazy this Gen. Just like the voltage discrepancy bug I'm sure nvidia will weasel their way out of this. ICYMI I still can't get DSR with SLI, no MFAA with SLi + Surround, Voltage discrepancy still exists, etc...

How long have these cards been out now? Yeah.. nvidia definitely disappointed this time. I would think by now their drivers would have rectified many of these issues.

Now this issue being a hardware limitation definitely piques my curiosity. I wonder how they'll deal with this. Honestly I feel there isn't enough negative press on this for them to respond yet. Those affected are not doing a good enough job because they either don't care or really don't feel that it's worth complaining about.
 
Dayaks said:
I think the majority of games don't use over 3.5GB so it may not have been visible on benchmarks but if you did go over supposively your FPS goes to hell. Technically they have 4GB but the last 0.5 is essentially useless it's so slow. Probably matters more for SLI and such. I don't think I've seen my 980 go over 3.3 real world usage.
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Do we have any in-game evidence that shows that FPS "goes to hell" when VRAM goes up over 3.5 GB? What kind of numbers are we talking about here?

Nevermind Nai's benchmark for a second. What is the real-world impact of the problem?
 
jwcalla said:
Do we have any in-game evidence that shows that FPS "goes to hell" when VRAM goes up over 3.5 GB? What kind of numbers are we talking about here?

Nevermind Nai's benchmark for a second. What is the real-world impact of the problem?
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From what I've seen, the average framerates aren't hit all that bad, but end-users are reporting noticeable stuttering when exceeding 3.5 on their 970s. Frametime analysis will better demonstrate the performance impact than average framerate. I'd like to see Kyle or someone else here at the [H] take a closer look with their tools.
 
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