Michaelius
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That will run slower/stutter after VRAM passes 3.5gig?
I better run some benchmarks my gtx 970 might be 1/8 slower since today
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HardOCP looking into the 970 3.5GB issue?
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I better run some benchmarks my gtx 970 might be 1/8 slower since today
Unknown-One
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They didn't misrepresent the performance of the product. Review samples went out, retail cards perform in-line with the review samples. People got the performance they were led to expect at the price they were told it'd be available at.
no care.
Are you really trying to say that AMD misrepresenting the ACTUAL PERFORMANCE of their hardware with review samples is somehow less-deceitful than a number on a spec-sheet being inaccurate?
While I think nvidia was a bit shady about this, I'm pretty sure 99% of customers would still have bought the 970 even if it was a 3.5gb card.
I think it's also interesting that no one gets on manufacturers cases for offering 2gb+ of ram on PoS entry lvl cards that is totally useless but this is a big deal.
I think it's also interesting that no one gets on manufacturers cases for offering 2gb+ of ram on PoS entry lvl cards that is totally useless but this is a big deal.
notarat
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I hear they're partnering with SOE on a fix for this.
You just pay for an airdrop containing an extra 512MB of VRAM. It's contested though so you may or may nor get it
You just pay for an airdrop containing an extra 512MB of VRAM. It's contested though so you may or may nor get it
It's unfortunate, but at the same time it would've cost you far more than 4-6% to buy a chip that didn't have that L2 disabled. They are binned based on chips that don't work perfectly from manufacturing... They shut the defective parts off.
If you put the constraint in that they have all L2 units work perfectly for 970 as people originally thought, far fewer chips qualify for the standards for the 970 SKU, meaning the cost to produce each qualifying chip goes up. This means retail pricing goes up, and it would go up by more than what you gain in performance by having the full L2/memory bandwidth configuration.
So you actually got better bang for buck this way. The people designing these products aren't idiots.
It was just a spec miscommunication. 970 performance is 970 performance is 970 performance.
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Brackle
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They lied for 4 months to users over the specs. No other way to spin it.
I know you guys can try. But there is no way the shills can cover this now. Its on every major website.
I Think I have a right to be pissed, im a 970 GTX owner who paid $720 for 2 of them.
It's just a memory partition.
Now the AMD throttling issue. That was a major f*** up.
Wow are you seriously that dense, or are you on nVidia's payroll? nVidia fucked up, knew about this all along but never said anything because they figured nobody would notice. And now that this is all over the net they have no choice to but to come clean. Them coming clean is because they can no longer sweep this under the rug, and if it came from them it would at least save them the embarassment of being called out. There's no other way to spin this.
Umm, if the design has to be cleared by nVidia, then yeah that pretty much constitutes "limitation" in my book. To give a concrete example, MSI never released the 780 Ti Lightning, because nVidia did not approve of completely unlocked voltage.
In any case I'm getting off-topic, I actually wanted to clear up this bit of misinformation:
I can guarantee you right now that if you're not overclocking the card, 2x6 pin is more than enough for stock clocks, and the throttling mess is purely because of EVGA's shitty BIOS that caps the power limit to 145W.
AnandTech said:
Does 145W approach the 225W upper limit of a dual 6 pin card? On top of that, the Asus Strix 970 comes with a single 8 pin, which is equivalent to 2x6 pins in terms of power delivery, but Asus at least had enough foresight to set power target to 163W, which can be boosted to 196W at 120%, so the Asus card has no issues with power throttling at stock clocks or even a mild overclock.
That was caused by a less agressive fan profile on some cards and was fixed in a driver update. There was NO evidence that review samples were special.
Wow you are as bad as Prime1.
What does the quality of the news have to do with the quality of the reviews? I've mostly ignored their news posts for years, doesn't mean the reviews done by the GPU editors aren't rock solid.
Would you be happy buying a v8 car and then finding out that is was just a v6 tweaked to perform like a v8?
Zinn
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no because that would be false advertising.
Yakk
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Joking aside, this is actually a lot worst than what it originally looked like.
4 months of selling a product with the wrong product specifications alone will land ANY company in extremely hot water!
Now add in keeping the segmented memory issue, which was done by design, a secret! WTF!?
This is serious.
How much do you feel they are worth to you now?
Funny you should say that... I didn't buy my car because it is a V8.
I bought it for the 400+ horsepower and the sound it happens to make as a result of being a V8.
If it didn't make the power I wanted (older car with V8) or make the sound I wanted (poor sound) I would've looked elsewhere. If an alternate motor design sounded as bad ass and made the power I would've bought it.
The specific fact that it is a V8 did not affect my decision.
And a 970 is not a V6. If it could only use 3.5GB it would be a closer comparison (even though unlike a V6, the 970 GPU would still be running like a V8 up to 3.5GB, making this comparison even worse). But it's a 4GB card that uses 4GB. NVIDIA knows how to build an efficient GPU better than us.
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Zinn
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Worth mentioning that Titanfall uses over 3.5gb of memory with high resolution and AA enabled. Games that do this will be the rule rather than the exception within the year.
It became much larger that a spec-sheet error.
Many review sites post charts showing the physical differenes, ie ROPS, CUDA cores, between cards so those inaccuracies were seen by many potenial buyers.
Zinn
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So you'd be fine being sold a highly overclocked GTX 970 instead of a GTX 980 if it performed the same in benchmarks? Give me a break.
No high-end user wants to hear that their high-end $300+ video card actually chokes on the last 1/2 gig of vram and is actually operating in 224-bit mode 99% of the time, that's just bs.
Yet it affects many others. It isn't just about satisfying your buying process.
No, but only because overclocking has other implications for GPU lifespan and deviating from the reference design.
Otherwise, for the price you see 970 vs. 980? Absolutely. Are you insane?
Brackle
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I would say $300. Since they really are only 3.5gb and 56 ROPS and 1.75mb L2 Cache.
Dayaks
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I can't believe people are effectively defending nVidia...
My thoughts exactly. But considering I got the Gigabyte 970 (probably the best on the market right now) for $330, I'm not as pissed as I should be.
Me neither. This is indefensible.
Sure... But my point is exactly that those people are responding emotionally and irrationally.
No, it's not at all. For one thing, unlike a v6 which is slower throughout, the 970 is full speed all the way up to 7/8 memory usage. Even then, the overall impact of using the last 512MB is tiny because that last section of memory is lower priority stuff. There is no analog for this in your car engine analogy, so it is just bad to use here. Any real game workload has amounts of data you can put in there and see very low impact. Games do not require all memory to be fast, as not all allocated resources are used, let alone used equally.
Not to mention you were never buying a v8. You knowingly bought a cut down chip from the start, based on the performance and price. Just the knowledge on the way it was cut down changed.
If you want the few percent performance back in those specific high memory usage cases, you can be sure the 970 would cost more than a few percent more at retail. You would not get it for free, because the binning of the chip is what enabled you to buy the 970 at the price it is in the first place. You were not cheated and got exactly what you paid for.
Unlike a v6 vs. v8, the 970s processor is no slower than you thought. One link to memory is slower.
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Zinn
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Slapping a turbo on a V6 engine to match the performance of a V8 has analogous implications on reliability. But as long as you're happy with it, that means everyone else should be
I'm building a new rig. And I was just about to buy a new 970.
I'm also getting a new 32" Samsung with 2640x1440. And with all this horse shit going on with this memory issues. I will certainly not be buying the 970 now.
I haven't had a Nvidia card for several years now. And it looks like i will be going with AMD once again. At least their cards can utilize the full 4GB of memory with the 290x. Actually save me $50 bucks to because they are on sale now.
Nvidia just lost me as a customer.
I'm also getting a new 32" Samsung with 2640x1440. And with all this horse shit going on with this memory issues. I will certainly not be buying the 970 now.
I haven't had a Nvidia card for several years now. And it looks like i will be going with AMD once again. At least their cards can utilize the full 4GB of memory with the 290x. Actually save me $50 bucks to because they are on sale now.
Nvidia just lost me as a customer.
Unknown-One
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Aaaaand who cares? There's no spin-doctoring needed here, it literally isn't that big a deal.
They didn't lie about the performance. They didn't lie about the price. Who gives a shit how it attains said performance?
Aaaaand who cares? There's no spin-doctoring needed here, it literally isn't that big a deal.
They didn't lie about the performance. They didn't lie about the price. Who gives a shit how it attains said performance?
As a Titan owner, I would never touch a 970 card now, that's for sure. High-end users avoid unbalanced memory layouts on video cards for a reason.
Websites posted the specs on this card. Emotional or not some people use those specs when deciding to buy. Those specs were WRONG. That is were a car dealer claiming you will get a V8 and selling a V6 apply. It IS a big deal.
Unknown-One
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All the reviews already showed how a GTX 970 performed, including frame-time percentiles. This new information has not, in any way, changed how a GTX 970 performs. If the GTX 970's performance is a problem for you now, it should have been a problem for you on launch-day.
Also... why would a Titan owner ever consider a GTX 970 in the first place? Seems like an overall downgrade.
Zinn
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And it does have a real-world impact in games that use over 3.5gb, in terms of stuttering. Everyone apologizing for Nvidia is basing their argument on the assumption that games won't continue to require increasing amounts of video memory.
Zinn
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That's bullshit. You should expect that future games that require all of the advertised VRAM will perform as if your video card could address all of the advertised VRAM on the advertised bus speed. Just because last year's games worked fine in benchmarks doesn't mean jack.
Slapping a turbo on a V6 engine to match the performance of a V8 has analogous implications on reliability. But as long as you're happy with it, that means everyone else should be
No it doesn't. Clearly you don't know how reliability works.
A car from the factory with a turbo is different than aftermarket.
I know the factory sold me the turbo factoring in reasonable lifespan. Aftermarket turbos (and overclocked GPUs) have no such guarantee.
I was just pointing out that its a bad example. You bought the performance you saw in reviews, did you not?
Unknown-One
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Which was never misrepresented in benchmarks. There are frame-time percentile scores from review samples on launch-day that tell you EXACTLY how a GTX 970 will perform.
That performance curve has not changed. You still got the performance you paid for. The only thing that's changed is you know WHY the performance curve looks like it does.
So yeah... why is this a big deal?
People that look at spec sheets like this seen on pcper and use it in their buying decision.Aaaaand who cares? There's no spin-doctoring needed here, it literally isn't that big a deal.
They didn't lie about the performance. They didn't lie about the price. Who gives a shit how it attains said performance?
GeForce GTX 980
GeForce GTX 970 (Corrected)
GPU Code name
GM204
GM204
GPU Cores
2048
1664
Rated Base Clock
1126 MHz
1050 MHz
Texture Units
128
104
ROP Units
64
52
L2 Cache
2048 KB
1792 KB
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