Nvidia announces record revenue for its third quarter

[Seanspeed]

Does anyone actually care besides the rabid fanboys? OOh multi billion dollar company has pockets jingling with cash, and?

Really don't understand the point of threads like this.

I care that a company(one of only two) who builds gaming enthusiast GPU's is doing ok, sure.

It's only a problem if you're cheering this as some 'victory' against AMD(who I wish were doing better).

 

[Dave2150]

Those 3.5GB 970's sold well. Too bad the general public knew no better.

Yep, the sad fact is there are still people being recommended to buy one now.

Some NVIDIA fans would prefer to stop AMD getting a sale on a cheaper 390, with over double the VRAM of a 970, just because they want NVIDIA to completely dominate.

 

[D.P.]

I care that a company(one of only two) who builds gaming enthusiast GPU's is doing ok, sure.

It's only a problem if you're cheering this as some 'victory' against AMD(who I wish were doing better).

You can be sure that if the shoe was on the other foot these very same people would be shouting form the roof tops giving all kinds of justifications why (quite rightly) a GPU manufacturer doing financially well is good for gamers. Some people with an deep rooted affection for a certain brand just want to put fingers in their ears every time the finances of nvidia and AMD are reported, their loss and they shouldn't spam these threads if they genuinely don't care.

 

[Seanspeed]

Yep, the sad fact is there are still people being recommended to buy one now.

Some NVIDIA fans would prefer to stop AMD getting a sale on a cheaper 390, with over double the VRAM of a 970, just because they want NVIDIA to completely dominate.

vRAM isn't everything. 390 is a great card and is the on-paper better buy at the moment in terms of value, but I would not scoff at somebody recommending a 970. Still a very good card and it will beat a 390 in many games still.

 

[andybird123]

No sorcery, it's the same pie. Just Nvidia is getting a bigger slice, as AMD's market share goes down Nvidia's goes up.

Next year the pie should get even bigger, with the introduction of real tech progress and performance improvements. Should create market growth. Interesting to see what happens to AMD's and Nvidia's slices of it then..

Didnt someone else recently say AMD had gained market share in Q3?

 

[D.P.]

Didnt someone else recently say AMD had gained market share in Q3?

No, it was a ludicrous article that stated since AMD hadn't dropped prices of the Fiji cards and that nvida had dropped Maxwell prices then AMD miust be gaining market share and Nvidia desperate for sales. LOL, It was such a farce and discredited within minutes. it completely ignored supply and demand, the fact that Nidia hadn't officially lowered prices, that a FuryX was like rocking horse excrement and the actual sales showed Nvidia stronger than ever.

 

[andybird123]

Though to be fair AMD's computing and graphics did grow 13% qtr-to-qtr, so there does seem to be some genuine market growth rather than just more slide to nvidia

 

[thebennyboy]

Well they know better than you that there is actually 4GB of fully accessible high speed VRAM that ran games just fine as reported by all benchmarks.

Nope... it has 3.5GB of full speed memory and 0.5GB of slower memory. Although it's all the same physical memory on the PCB, it cannot be accessed at full speed. That you CANNOT deny.

Go to 2:50 - I quote "runs about 1/7 of the speed of the main block".

 

[D.P.]

What is "Full speed"? if there some legal definition that I am missing?

The simple fact is the 970 can access 4.0GB of video memory far faster than it could pulling 3.5GB form VRAM and 0.5GB data from system memory, so it is basically an entirely moot point unless you happen to be fanboy, this is born out in the benchmarks by which people made their purchasing decisions. Nvidia should have made it clear to reviewers and should caught the marketing mistakes earlier, but none of that detracts form the facts that you get a GPU with 4GB of VRAM that doesn't show any effect of the fact that 0.5GB is slower.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Stunning

 

[setter]

The more money they make, the more they can put into r&d to come up with better performing products. Tbh I don't see much wrong with this.

 

[Pottsey]

What is "Full speed"? if there some legal definition that I am missing?

The simple fact is the 970 can access 4.0GB of video memory far faster than it could pulling 3.5GB form VRAM and 0.5GB data from system memory, so it is basically an entirely moot point unless you happen to be fanboy, this is born out in the benchmarks by which people made their purchasing decisions. Nvidia should have made it clear to reviewers and should caught the marketing mistakes earlier, but none of that detracts form the facts that you get a GPU with 4GB of VRAM that doesn't show any effect of the fact that 0.5GB is slower.

Full speed means the speed the RAM is rated for. For example 5,000MHZ GGDR5 should run at full speed at 5,000MHZ. It shouldn't run at 714mhz

It’s not a moot point if you happen to be doing something that’s memory and bandwidth intensive like Ray Tracing just as one example where you need that full speed for the entire 4GB. Or if you run at Ultra HD you might need that full speed. Going down to 1/7 of full speed can under some situations cause a massive bottleneck over a similar product that has full speed ram for the entire ram. We are not talking as small difference here. 150 GB/s bandwidth for the first section and 20th GB/s bandwidth for the last section. As soon as you dip into that last bit of memory you take a large performance hit anywhere from 6% to as much as 85.71% loss in performance in extreme situations but on average its closer to 6%. How is it a moot point unless you happen to be fanboy? Its a major fact "some" users need to know before buying the product. Not everyone makes purchasing decisions on benchmarks, many make purchasing decisions on specs and in this case the specs are misleading.

 

[Pottsey]

The more money they make, the more they can put into r&d to come up with better performing products. Tbh I don't see much wrong with this.

Or they can waste a few 100 million per quarter on Tegra sorry current resist.

 

[D.P.]

Full speed means the speed the RAM is rated for. For example 5,000MHZ GGDR5 should run at full speed at 5,000MHZ. It shouldn't run at 714mhz

It’s not a moot point if you happen to be doing something that’s memory and bandwidth intensive like Ray Tracing just as one example where you need that full speed for the entire 4GB. Or if you run at Ultra HD you might need that full speed. Going down to 1/7 of full speed can under some situations cause a massive bottleneck over a similar product that has full speed ram for the entire ram. We are not talking as small difference here. 150 GB/s bandwidth for the first section and 20th GB/s bandwidth for the last section. As soon as you dip into that last bit of memory you take a large performance hit anywhere from 6% to as much as 85.71% loss in performance in extreme situations but on average its closer to 6%. How is it a moot point unless you happen to be fanboy? Its a major fact "some" users need to know before buying the product. Not everyone makes purchasing decisions on benchmarks, many make purchasing decisions on specs and in this case the specs are misleading.

the entire 4.0GB runs at full speed in that is your definition.
Can you provide any benchmarks to show that the 970 memory architecture is a limiting factor?

Remember, windows will keep a good chunk of that 512MB for itself even while gaming, and API overheads will fill up the rest in most situations.

 

[Gerard]

If the 970 ram situation was such a non issue then why were refunds offered? It wasn't until a website discovered this that nvidia came out with some drivel about it being a "miscommunication" in their marketing department.

So nobody outside the marketers at nvidia knew this and everyone else were clueless and didn't read review sites? Yeah, very believable. They got caught with their pants down, if this hadn't been discovered by a site then its unlikely they would have ever mentioned it.

 

[D.P.]

Refunds were offered because people kicked up a fuss and Nidia didn't advertise the card correctly, doesn't stop it being a non-issue.

Your point that nobody would have noticed until a website pointed it out is exactly why it is a non-issue because it has zero effect on performance, as proven in countless benchmarks used by people deciding to buy the game.

 

[Pottsey]

the entire 4.0GB runs at full speed in that is your definition.
Can you provide any benchmarks to show that the 970 memory architecture is a limiting factor?

Remember, windows will keep a good chunk of that 512MB for itself even while gaming, and API overheads will fill up the rest in most situations.

Short of time so will just use this one link.

http://www.pcper.com/image/view/52237?return=node/62218

On the left from 0MB to 3072MB memory used up the card has 405.25 GByte/s. As soon as you hit 3200MB of ram used up the GByte/s falls to 145.1. Once you hit 3328MB the GByte/s have falls to 72.74GB and finally at 3712MB RAM used up the GByte/s falls to 26.69.

On the right you have a card that can run the entire 4GB at full speed. Right up to 3712MB the GByte/s is still at fall speed. It’s clear there is a large performance loss once you start using more then 3GB of ram.

“it has zero effect on performance, as proven in countless benchmarks used by people deciding to buy the game.” .

Where are you getting that from? NVidia themselves said after testing in the lab it impacted game performance. What do you mean zero performance? As soon as you starting accessing the last 1GB of ram there is a noticeable performance drop with the GTX970 over doing the same thing with a GTX980.

It’s not a problem no one noticed until a website pointed it out. It was a problem for gamers running at Ultra HD and getting unexpected performance drops and frame stuttering once the last 1GB of ram got accessed. How is a real performance drop a none issue? Just look at BF4 and in CoD which are more apt to shutter with the 970 over the 980 due to the memory problem.

EDIT: It doesn't effect most gamers that badly but those of us that do Ray Tracing or run at UHD resolutions can run into shuttering problems. So I cannot agree its a none issue.