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

[Amatsubu]

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've never encountered any issues at 1440p nor have all the people I know who have/had a 970. The card was running out of grunt quite a lot but there was no stuttering related to vram.

I agree Nvidia deserve all the hate for this but I think it's a bit overblown.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nvidia marketing has to take the blame for this,as they hid the true specs of the card.

The worse thing is that the GTS450,GTX660(which I had) and the GTX660TI all used a segmented memory layout - the first 1.5GB of VRAM of the GTX660 and GTX660TI had access to a 192 bit memory controller and the last 512MB was accessed by a 64 bit memory controller.

Nvidia were open about this - they were not about the GTX970. It pretty much sounds like a marketing made move. I suspect Nvidia marketing didn't like the sound of a R9 290 4GB against a GTX970 4GB with 3.5GB of RAM using a 224 bit memory controller and the last 512MB using a 32 bit memory controller,as the latter part would have less bandwidth than some modern DDR4 systems.

 

[james.miller]

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.

Crinkleshoes ran sli, which was the primary reason he was seeing issues. He was also rather patronising in the way he liked to remind people how little they knew about the issues, especially considering he could never got the technical specs right. despite being told a number of times, he always insisted the 970 had 2mb of L2 cache and 64 ROPs .

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.

Don't know why anybody would call you that based on that post tbh.


As far as humbugs issue with SC goes, I have no doubt that humbug has already ruled the psu and I suspect it's totally repeatable. Ie, he can run the game to the point of stuttering, shut it down, start it up again and do exactly the second again over and over. I don't for a second think it's an issue with his PC.

 

[melmac]

Crinkleshoes ran sli, which was the primary reason he was seeing issues. He was also rather patronising in the way he liked to remind people how little they knew about the issues, especially considering he could never got the technical specs right. despite being told a number of times, he always insisted the 970 had 2mb of L2 cache and 64 ROPs .

Oh, yes, I remember his tone as well and remember his vague tech specs too. It's basically why I remember he had issues with the 970

And, yes I don't believe for one second that Humbug is making stuff up or has other issues with his PC, he is too long at computers for that.

Likewise, other people haven't had any issues and they aren't wrong either.

The problem was real though, if the stuttering hadn't been noticed, nivida would have never had to explain it and wouldn't be paying out on a lawsuit right now.

 

[humbug]

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.

Your right but i put it somewhat more bluntly.

The card is fundamentally broken.

There are always going to be people who don't play at the same settings, or play the same games or even have the ###### card at all who will persist "no... all lies, no problems cuz i don't with all my 782 games and my mates don't" are obviously not being entirely straight (to put it politely)
They have half the Steam library and in all their time never had any V-Ram related issues? testicles!

I would and do believe some people when they quite pragmatically say "its never been a problem for me but there are a lot of stories and evidence about it, plus Nvidia was after all found to be at fault so perhaps it is a problem for some"

The fact is a lot of people will not have this issue a lot if at all for various reasons nothing to do with the cards problems or lack there of, for example some people prefer FPS over Image Quality so the latter will run the highest possible settings which then fill up that gimped buffer.

Be that as it may they are innocently ignorant to such technicalities, but others just don't like their mistresses name being slandered.
To the latter i hope Nvidia find more ways to take them for fools, fat lot of good it will do deserving victims, they will never see it coming nor know its happening to them.

Nvidia deserve this, but they are not the only ones and Nvidia ain't done with crap yet.

 

[siriq111]

Your right but i put it somewhat more bluntly.

The card is fundamentally broken.

There are always going to be people who don't play at the same settings, or play the same games or even have the ###### card at all who will persist "no... all lies, no problems cuz i don't with all my 782 games and my mates don't" are obviously not being entirely straight (to put it politely)
They have half the Steam library and in all their time never had any V-Ram related issues? testicles!

I would and do believe some people when they quite pragmatically say "its never been a problem for me but there are a lot of stories and evidence about it, plus Nvidia was after all found to be at fault so perhaps it is a problem for some"

The fact is a lot of people will not have this issue a lot if at all for various reasons nothing to do with the cards problems or lack there of, for example some people prefer FPS over Image Quality so the latter will run the highest possible settings which then fill up that gimped buffer.

Be that as it may they are innocently ignorant to such technicalities, but others just don't like their mistresses name being slandered.
To the latter i hope Nvidia find more ways to take them for fools, fat lot of good it will do deserving victims, they will never see it coming nor know its happening to them.

Nvidia deserve this, but they are not the only ones and Nvidia ain't done with crap yet.

I would personally add up the Fermi DirectX 12 and Vulkan support , if you don't mind. This practice from the company is getting spread in many areas . I love NV products but the way the company threat the customers are way wrong.

 

[smilertoo]

It was basically a 3.5gb card advertised as having 4gb, using the last 0.5gb crippled performance but 99/100 people will never have needed the full 4gb anyway so never had any problems. nVidia continue to shoot themselves in the feet by now saying ok we were wrong and we've been punished by the US courts to pay out $30 per card...but only to US customers, the rest of you suckers can whistle.

 

[siriq111]

It was basically a 3.5gb card advertised as having 4gb, using the last 0.5gb crippled performance but 99/100 people will never have needed the full 4gb anyway so never had any problems. nVidia continue to shoot themselves in the feet by now saying ok we were wrong and we've been punished by the US courts to pay out $30 per card...but only to US customers, the rest of you suckers can whistle.

Should be a world wide case. Once the case hit 10-30 $million of dollars , nv start to think different way. Then just a bit effort to put this up to 50 mill or more.

Money talks, dogs just barks.

 

[siriq111]

So looks like another lawsuit is up on: http://www.pcinvasion.com/nvidia-gtx-980-960-lawsuit-notifications-sent-newegg-customers it is different compare to 970.

 

[humbug]

So looks like another lawsuit is up on: http://www.pcinvasion.com/nvidia-gtx-980-960-lawsuit-notifications-sent-newegg-customers it is different compare to 970.

The comments suggest its because of advertising them as having "full DX12 support" when they ain't.

Dunno if they did that but so far it seems Maxwell has DX12 support by name only, not meaningful features.

 

[siriq111]

The comments suggest its because of advertising them as having full DX12 support when they ain't.

Dunno if they did that but so far it seems Maxwell has DX12 support by name only, not meaningful features.

Same as for Fermi DX 12. On website there is the support but not a single mature driver to use normally DX 12 with Fermi.
Nvidia deserved this much. Apparently , more lawsuits against nvidia.

 

[bru]

This is daft, I didn't think that any of the currant crop or even the last crop of cards have full DX12 support, they all have a feature or two that they don't do. almost a case of who and what can we sue for today.

Of course I expect it to be fine right up until some one takes on AMD for something or other and then it will be completely wrong.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Intel has probably the most complete DX12 support out there AFAIK.

 

[D.P.]

This is daft, I didn't think that any of the currant crop or even the last crop of cards have full DX12 support, they all have a feature or two that they don't do. almost a case of who and what can we sue for today.

Of course I expect it to be fine right up until some one takes on AMD for something or other and then it will be completely wrong.

Maxwell supports more DX12 features than any GCN card, so that reasoning is just absurd.

 

[humbug]

Maxwell supports more DX12 features than any GCN card, so that reasoning is just absurd.

It supports different features, none which seem to give Maxwell any benefit, while AMD's apparently lesser DX12 support on 3 year old cards does, often in a big way.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

What about AMDs false advertising of their Fury X ?

 

[tommybhoy]

OC'ers dream and twice as fast as TX are verbal claims that end up wide open to ridicule.

What someone claims verbally that it can do via a press conference isn't false advertising.

Releasing specs on product descriptions is a different ball game.

 

[Insanties_birth]

What about AMDs false advertising of their Fury X ?

Was that actually marketing / advertising or just a slip up from one person at one single time? Not sure if it was reiterated after that point or not but if it's just the one time then it doesn't seem enough to entirely mislead many.

Bit petty to try and compare the two and ignore the clear distinctions.

 

[TheRealDeal]

Was that actually marketing / advertising or just a slip up from one person at one single time? Not sure if it was reiterated after that point or not but if it's just the one time then it doesn't seem enough to entirely mislead many.

Bit petty to try and compare the two and ignore the clear distinctions.

It was a slip up by Joe Macri. I don't think it was repeated again by AMD but once he put it out there it was to late to stop the hype. In a way it is an overclockers dream because it stays cool and quiet. Shame about the lack of clock improvement though . I think all he was getting at was the cooling was good.

 

[Gregster]

AMD = slip up and NVidia = Liar. At least be consistent guys lol.