970's having performance issues using 4GB Vram - Nvidia investigating

[elrasho]

Since you're lazy yes.

The update is....I've got a bacon sandwich and a nice cup of coffee. Now I'm ready to read more of this thread

Other then that read a few pages back.

edit=I see your edit. No word on MSI cards. But I'd book mark the page

It's 160+ pages

 

[slickric21]

Nice to see OCUK helping out customers on this, even though it looks like nVidia are not helping much, other than some PR bots all saying the same thing "We are really proud of the card and it represents great performance/value" yada yada

 

[Sencha]

Overclockers customer service has come a very, very long way in the near 10 years I've been using them. Well done guys!

 

[pieman109]

Not read the entire thread anyone give a brief update as to what's going on? From the few apges I've read the 970s dont use the entire 4GB for VRAM so people want to return them? Im gaming at 1080p so it won't affect me right?

Its not that not all of Vram is being used. its that the last 512 mb of it is gimped so it drops the bandwidth, causing performance to drop, resulting in stuttering, lack of smoothness, etc. This means only 3.5gb of Vram is running at full speed (bandwidth) effectively.
Nvidia are going through "flak avoidance" atm saying theres nothing wrong with the cards, they perform properly, but they didn't mention about the 512mb of gimped Vram and they've been found out so a lot of people here, and everywhere else for that matter, are a bit miffed that they've been mislead by Nvidia and are demanding some form of compensation/fix, etc.
Ocuk incidentally are doping a damn good job in helping out people who bought these GTX970 cards and deserve all the praise thye're getting, especially Gibbo,

 

[jwilliamson47]

It's 160+ pages

In basic terms, Nvidia are gits, Gibbo is a hit!

 

[Wizzfizz]

It's 160+ pages

No it's not, it's 63

 

[elrasho]

Its not that not all of Vram is being used. its that the last 512 mb of it is gimped so it drops the bandwidth, causing performance a drop, stuttering, lack of smoothness, etc. This means only 3.5gb of Vram is running at full speed effectively.

Ah thanks mate. I noticed all these benchmarks are being done at higher resolutions than 1080p si I shouldn't suffer from these performance drops. I played COD:AW and Dying Light with everything maxed out and it runs at 60+fps easily. I'd imagine at a higher resolution I'd get these problems.

 

[Sencha]

What I am decided on is that overclockers will be the first place I look for stuff from now on, and likely buy from them even if they are a bit more expensive.

I'm assuming many here feel similarly, based on their response thus far to this issue, which was not of their making.

+1

 

[jwilliamson47]

The only good to come from this is I will now only buy from the vendors who supported OCUK.

 

[P0tenc]

It is not just about false advertising but also the omission of relevant information such as a significantly slower 512MB of Vram.

 

[Dervious]

Your missing the point.. you keep using the word 'Advert'

Do I ?

 

[AtreuS]

Your missing the point.. you keep using the word 'Advert'.. but they never advertised it wrong..

The only thing that was wrong is that they gave the 980 memory specs to reviewers..

Its says 4gb on the box it has 4gb.. how its used is not in question... everyone assumed...

On the box it says 4GB/256bit data bus.... which is not quite correct. Any normal user would read that as being a full 256bit data bus over the whole 4GB and thats why the product is mislabelled. Even the advert on the ocuk page said 256bit bus... not the true bus information.

 

[PayneUK]

The only good to come from this is I will now only buy from the vendors who supported OCUK.

Its hard to really blame the board partners for not supporting a return, just like retailers they are not the one's who caused the issue. But good CS is good CS, so it will have a baring on the brand of my next GPU.

As for NVidia, it appears that they have realized that the cards are still selling very well and a vast majority of people either don’t know about the issue or don’t care, and never will.

Especially as it now appears some retailers and board partners are picking up the slack in terms of dealing with the people who feel disgruntled. Hopefully the increased scrutiny that should now be put on NVidia products will ensure this doesn’t happen again, and may even result in better products.

Personally I am extremely dissatisfied with NVidia and I’ve gone from someone who’s been almost exclusive to their brand (I even own a Shield tablet and was eyeing up a g-sync monitor) to someone who will almost certainly buy an AMD card next and for the foreseeable future. In reality it will mean nothing to NVidia, but their opinion no longer means much to me either.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Ah thanks mate. I noticed all these benchmarks are being done at higher resolutions than 1080p si I shouldn't suffer from these performance drops. I played COD:AW and Dying Light with everything maxed out and it runs at 60+fps easily. I'd imagine at a higher resolution I'd get these problems.

The issue probably ain't going be too much problem for single 970 user in general, but the for SLI 970 users with they they essentially have nearly twice the GPU grunt, meaning that would be FAR MORE data going through those cards, thus the strange memory access make up would far more likely to cause performance/smoothless issue. It's probably similar in the sense to you may not get CPU bottleneck if you were using a single card, but when an extra card being added to SLI/Crossfire, CPU bottleneck can occur become easily exposed.

 

[pieman109]

Ah thanks mate. I noticed all these benchmarks are being done at higher resolutions than 1080p si I shouldn't suffer from these performance drops. I played COD:AW and Dying Light with everything maxed out and it runs at 60+fps easily. I'd imagine at a higher resolution I'd get these problems.

I don't "think" theres a problem at 1080, its 1440 and above where the issues are really being seen. I'm going to be getting a 1440 screen very shortly and I'm hoping that the 3.5/4 g/b of Vram on me card is going to cope with it. I personally feel that the issue, for me at least, is not that I might have to turn down the settings to get favorable frame rates, it "how far" I'll have to turn them down that concerns me.

 

[Dervious]

It's a different argument to say something is inherently faulty verses something has been mis-sold with false advertising.

I would guess this is Nvidia shifting responsibility from themselves to the card manufacturers and retailers down the supply chain. After all, Nvidia don't sell cards to the public, they sell parts and cards to the AIB manufacturers.

We've seen Nvidia throw their partners under the bus more than once in the past, so I don't see this as any different. It's the way they do business.

Their partners are quoting VRAM specifications which don't mention the 3.5 + 0.5GB. Maybe they don't have to, but due to the partitioning, can the memory achieve the stated bandwidth ?

http://galax.net/KFA2/970exoc_black.html

Does the 970 have the same memory bandwidth as the 980 ?

http://galax.net/KFA2/980soc.html

 

[Andy__C]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbHY09Xf0J0

yes, it's either a 290X price drop.....or maybe the 380X

you can sense AMD are about to do something

I think its just the next Fixer video mate..... amusing marketing/competition trashing.

This one blatently done to take advantage of the situation. I moved from years of AMD to a 970 and still find the Fixer vids amusing.



On a different note, the retract of Nvidia's communication/commitment on driver fix/attempts to improve the situation is disappointing.

 

[jwilliamson47]

Its hard to really blame the board partners for not supporting a return, just like retailers they are not the one's who caused the issue. But good CS is good CS, so it will have a baring on the brand of my next GPU.

As for NVidia, it appears that they have realized that the cards are still selling very well and a vast majority of people either don’t know about the issue or don’t care, and never will.

Especially as now it appears some retailers and board partners are picking up the slack in terms of dealing with the people who feel disgruntled. Hopefully the increased scrutiny that should now be put on NVidia products will ensure this doesn’t happen again, and may even result in better products.

Personally I am extremely dissatisfied with NVidia and I’ve gone from someone who’s been almost exclusive to their brand (I even own a Shield tablet and was eyeing up a g-sync monitor) to someone who will almost certainly buy an AMD card next and for the foreseeable future. In reality it will mean nothing to NVidia, but their opinion no longer means much to me either.

Yeah, I'd go along with that. I'm not angry at the vendors or retailers, the blame has to be put on Nvidia. It's not just about the card stuttering, and being lied to, but their patronizing attitude has probably put me off them and I will buy AMD cards now.

 

[handsomejesus]

Gibbo, thanks for the amazing customer support.

If I decided to swap out my Infinity Black 970 for the KFA2 980, and pay the difference, would I be reimbursed for the return postage?

 

[andybird123]

Nice to see OCUK helping out customers on this, even though it looks like nVidia are not helping much, other than some PR bots all saying the same thing "We are really proud of the card and it represents great performance/value" yada yada

Its hard to really blame the board partners for not supporting a return, just like retailers they are not the one's who caused the issue. But good CS is good CS, so it will have a baring on the brand of my next GPU.

As for NVidia, it appears that they have realized that the cards are still selling very well and a vast majority of people either don’t know about the issue or don’t care, and never will.

Especially as now it appears some retailers and board partners are picking up the slack in terms of dealing with the people who feel disgruntled. Hopefully the increased scrutiny that should now be put on NVidia products will ensure this doesn’t happen again, and may even result in better products.

Personally I am extremely dissatisfied with NVidia and I’ve gone from someone who’s been almost exclusive to their brand (I even own a Shield tablet and was eyeing up a g-sync monitor) to someone who will almost certainly buy an AMD card next and for the foreseeable future. In reality it will mean nothing to NVidia, but their opinion no longer means much to me either.

I would be very very surprised, given the number of retailers and board partners who are stepping in to accept returns, if nvidia are doing absolutely nothing for their part in supporting this.

The public statement from an nvidia employee to "go ahead and return your card and if you get any problems I'll try to help" was a bit brash and foolish, as there is no way one person could deal with all of the returns personally, however it shows clear intent from nvidia that they are expecting to have to shoulder some of the burden.

Obviously OCUK deserve some credit too in saying they'll accept returns even where they don't have a clear message from their suppliers, however given the purchasing power of OCUK I would also be very surprised if those partners kept to that line going forwards as obviously OCUK are going to push lines that they in turn get good support from.