970 3.5GB 'Ramgate' - NVIDIA ordered to pay $30 to each owner

[r7slayer]

All of the vram is not accessible at once/same time anyway nor do you want to use the slower partition for gaming. Its why the 500mb partition is used for OS GUI for example. It's why people still call it a 3.5gb card even if it does have 4gb of vram. It's when the slower partition was used in games such as vram hungry games it produced stutter for some people. But nVidia addressed this. the 3.5 is the priority partition to be used in gaming while the 500mb is the idle partition so to speak.

 

[humbug]

All of the vram is not accessible at once/same time anyway nor do you want to use the slower partition for gaming. Its why the 500mb partition is used for OS GUI for example. It's why people still call it a 3.5gb card even if it does have 4gb of vram. It's when the slower partition was used in games such as vram hungry games it produced stutter for some people. But nVidia addressed this.

How have they addressed this?

 

[tommybhoy]

Dunno mate, but I fear for you as the days grow longer on Maxwell.

 

[r7slayer]

How have they addressed this?

Driver updates. When the slower partition is accessed it blocks access to the faster 3.5 partition for that cycle. In essence lowering the effectiveness of the bandwith. That's why you find less bandwidth intensive data been put into the slower partition.

 

[humbug]

Driver updates. When the slower partition is accessed it blocks access to the faster 3.5 partition for that cycle. In essence lowering the effectiveness of the bandwith. That's why you find less bandwidth intensive data been put into the slower partition.

It doesn't work, still get stuttering and massive FPS slowdowns.

 

[james.miller]

oh come on

I never said it was a slideshow if you could read what I said objectively I think it would be easier to interpret, but I'll try and simplify what I said one last time:

my point was your card wasn't breaching 3.7gb for a reason and that reason was slideshow.Obviously the drivers were doing everything they could to not cross that threshhold. how do you go from that to me not 'reading objectively'. Can you not have a sensible discussion either?

wtf

Bru said there's always been 4Gb, in a direct response to that comment I said what I saw was that it never always had 4Gb available.

physically having 4gb and having 4gb available to a game are two different things. Reading posts objectively - it's good advice. take it.

In known vram hungry games it was [email protected] for the game/up to 225mb for driver/os for quite some time, then all of a sudden the remaining slow ram was made available in the same vram hungry titles, the card started using all of it's available ram=you never got the whole 4Gb to use for some time.

Still don't in some games. but as for never having the whole 4gb to use, it was already already available in some titles like AC:U.

 

[tommybhoy]

Can someone else apart from james help me out here and tell me I'm making sense or not please?

Unless your being stubborn it's not hard to work out how a 970 that always capped under 3.8Gb then for it to suddenly fill it's buffer fully at a later date with newer drivers in the exact same titles, what's so fundamentally hard to understand what I'm saying unless you are being deliberately obtuse?

 

[r7slayer]

It doesn't work, still get stuttering and massive FPS slowdowns.

Don't know then mate, i thought it was addressed.

 

[james.miller]

Can someone else apart from james help me out here and tell me I'm making sense or not please?

Unless your being stubborn it's not hard to work out how a 970 that always capped under 3.8Gb then for it to suddenly fill it's buffer fully at a later date with newer drivers in the exact same titles, what's so fundamentally hard to understand what I'm saying unless you are being deliberately obtuse?

i'm not being obtuse, you're arguing something else entirely. obviously, if usage suddenly changes, all else being equal, it has to be as a result of a driver update.

this has not been disputed.

This whole driver update thing started because somebody said there way one magical driver that fixed the 970.

there hasn't been. Well, to my knowledge anyway. Nobody's found this magic driver yet.

I'm not sure why you think it's me struggling with this.


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Been playing around in Dying Light EE this morning, finally got round to buying it. Its pretty impressed, considering how ropey it was on release, it runs great. Can just about push past 3.7gb usage but the average frame rate drops to <40fps and its not really very playable as the framerate is varying a lot. If i stick everything on high and be sensible with the draw distance about 2/3rd max), very playable

Everything's a bit orange though. Going to see if there's some sort of sweetFX profile or something.

anyway that's off on a bit of a tangent

 

[Danny75]

Everything's a bit orange though. Going to see if there's some sort of sweetFX profile or something.

Wonder if the following is worth a shot:

Nvidia Control Panel > Adjust Desktop Colour settings > Choose how colour is set > Use Nvidia Settings (instead of Application settings) > check game, if no difference > return to settings and tinker with Hue.

 

[tommybhoy]

i'm not being obtuse, you're arguing something else entirely.

Your the only one that challenged it, but now your agreeing so it's all good.

 

[james.miller]

Your the only one that challenged it

No, no. I've mentioned drivers fixing individual games already (shadow of mordor for example), before you accused me of not being objective. Hence why I said you're arguing something else entirely. The driver discussion was never about individual games being optimised. I dont know how many times i can say that.

but now your agreeing so it's all good.

well, if that makes you feel better

Wonder if the following is worth a shot:

Nvidia Control Panel > Adjust Desktop Colour settings > Choose how colour is set > Use Nvidia Settings (instead of Application settings) > check game, if no difference > return to settings and tinker with Hue.

Doesnt really work, it needs to be something liek sweetFX but its such a chore with windows 10 that i just gave up lol. I'll try again later, I have lawn to mow lol

 

[nashathedog]

Everything's a bit orange though. Going to see if there's some sort of sweetFX profile or something.

There's several settings in the game that will allow you to fix that.
I run it with settings like chromatic abberation & film grain off and it looks fine.

 

[humbug]

Nvidia 'improved' some of it on a game by game basis.
Nvidia could then go back to reviewers and say "look we fixed it, use this driver and test again" sure enough most of the slow-downs and the worst of stuttering was gone.

The problem is thats a sticking plaster on the bits reviewers knew about, fundamentally its still a broken card, the underlying problem still exists.

Anything other than the few titles Nvidia worked on to improve the problem is every bit as bad as it always had been.

Here are 20 minutes of SC, the game loads in at about 3.5GB, and its fine at that, gradually it builds, 3.7GB there is a significant slowdown in FPS and the stuttering starts to come in, 3.8 to 3.9GB and it can only be described as an utterly unplayable mess, and it will reach 4GB.

 

[D.P.]

In Most of the games where the 970 starts stuttering at 3.8GB VRAM usage the 980 and FuryX also stutter so it is fairly irrelevant. The FuryX was particulalry bad with Shadows of Mordor for example until there were driver fixes, and AFAIk it is still stuttery with GTAV if your not careful to keep VRAm well under 4GB.

At 3.8GB average VRAM there are bound to be moments where vram goes over 4.0GB and something has to be cached

 

[humbug]

In Most of the games where the 970 starts stuttering at 3.8GB VRAM usage the 980 and FuryX also stutter so it is fairly irrelevant. The FuryX was particulalry bad with Shadows of Mordor for example until there were driver fixes, and AFAIk it is still stuttery with GTAV if your not careful to keep VRAm well under 4GB.

At 3.8GB average VRAM there are bound to be moments where vram goes over 4.0GB and something has to be cached

I know a lot of people with proper 4GB cards from AMD and Nvidia of all types and none of them suffer from the problems i do, yet the others with 970's do.

 

[Griffildur]

I know a lot of people with proper 4GB cards from AMD and Nvidia of all types and none of them suffer from the problems i do, yet the others with 970's do.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I have actually played Shadow of Mordor on my 970 and I haven't noticed this stutter you keep talking about. The 970 has been my card since December 2014, at 1440p and I played a lot.

Not once have I noticed this stutter you keep mentioning and I have hundreds of games both on Steam and Gog. In fact I play at least 5 different games every week. Any stutter, I would have noticed very quickly.

I cannot take this seriously, if I didn't have the card I would have understood, but I do and I just don't see it. Maybe you got a bad card, it happens, but your experience is not my experience.

gog - 208

Spoiler

steam - 134

Spoiler

 

[D.P.]

I know a lot of people with proper 4GB cards from AMD and Nvidia of all types and none of them suffer from the problems i do, yet the others with 970's do.

As above, plenty of people playing such games without issues on a 970. If you have an issue then check the rest of your system, could even be the PSU for example.

 

[melmac]

I know a lot of people with proper 4GB cards from AMD and Nvidia of all types and none of them suffer from the problems i do, yet the others with 970's do.

There was a few people complaining about this, I remember one guy called Crinkleshoes, on this forum, been particularly vocal about it.

Didn't affect everyone, but enough people were having vram problems with this card that 3.5Gb issue was brought to light and with further investigating it was found out that the 970 had missing rops and cache.

Which resulted in this lawsuit.

I don't know why people won't accept that there was a problem with the Vram. If people weren't having problems none of this would have ever seen the light of day.

And I better do an edit before I am called an AMD fanboy. The 970 is a great card and I don't think the issue affected performance much, if at all, for a lot of people. For me it wasn't about the performance, it was the flat out lies about the cache and rop count.

 

[Griffildur]

There was a few people complaining about this, I remember one guy called Crinkleshoes, on this forum, been particularly vocal about it.

Didn't affect everyone, but enough people were having vram problems with this card that 3.5Gb issue was brought to light and with further investigating it was found out that the 970 had missing rops and cache.

Which resulted in this lawsuit.

I don't know why people won't accept that there was a problem with the Vram. If people weren't having problems none of this would have ever seen the light of day.

It's not about not accepting that.

It definitely looks like the memory was used differently than other cards. I personally only replied to stuff which I had personal experience with, that's all.

I understand it works differently and there was something fishy with the numbers which obviously is not what one expected. I am not denying that. It does feel however like other people had other issues at work as well.

Now I wish I would have seen this stutter and would like to test more, I just can't be bothered to take my 1080 out and put the 970 back in just for that