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

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Sin_Chase said:
Has everyone glossed over ALL of the ground that has already been discussed to death?

Stop entering the thread 10s of pages late and posting the exact same incorrect information.

The peak memory bandwidth remains UNCHANGED. It is STILL 224GB/s when accessed as a full block. In fact, if you ignore the 0.5GB VRAM section and DO NOT ACCESS it peak bandwidth is actually lower, in the region of ~190GB/s.

So, the 0.5GB section of memory increases peak bandwidth, ignore it - you have less.
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Well I do applogise ...
 
Axil said:
Could Gibbo or Bailey be able to help me with some info regarding RMAs

I have a MSI 970GTX purchased September from OcUK . Just before Xmas it developed an issue where the fans do not spin down after gaming. This appears to be erratic and driver dependent as some drivers only exhibit the behavior after heavy usage whereas other drivers it occurs after any spin up. I contacted MSI and after they attempted a fix via bios (didn't work) they've said I should contact the retailer.

With all the stuff going around about the 970GTX memory issues and RMA, Would the issue I'm having be considered RMA and if so How do I get a RMA number

Thanks in Advance
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Post here
 
Also,
However because this is only applicable to situations where more than 3.5GB of VRAM is in use and both segments are necessary, this means it's only theoretically possible to achieve 224GB/sec when more than 3.5GB of VRAM
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So only when using more than 3.5gb of vram can you get that theoretical output and only then by

The easiest and most effective solution in this regard is to interleave reads and writes over the segments, such that one segment is writing while another segment is reading.
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If sales are still strong then I assume it would only be a select small % in Nvidias eyes who want a refund.

I still belive it has been mis sold. Because clasically 4gb on a card would mean 4gb. It is only with this new architecture where that is not the case and things have changed.
 
S2KIP said:
Yeah fair one, haha. :D
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He is trained in ragging hardware, explosives, how to kill people with just 1 finger and his favourite move throwing a person 25 metres over a 100 foot building, he is also an expert in chemical warfare, something to do with his protein diet.

We are safe! :D
 
almighty15 said:
What is wrong however is the ROP count.
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Which was never advertised or described by most (all?) e-tailors, certainly not at OCUK.

It's been demonstrated in a Reviewers GUIDE and...well - That's about it.

The Running Man said:
So only when using more than 3.5gb of vram can you get that theoretical output and only then by
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Precisely, peak bandwidth is as described.
 
almighty15 said:
People complaining about the VRAm amount is just silly, the card does have 4Gb like advertised.

What is wrong however is the ROP count.
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Before people complain about the ROP count difference as a performance bottleneck, keep in mind that the 13 SMMs in the GTX 970 can only output 52 pixels/clock and the seven segments of 8 ROPs each (56 total) can handle 56 pixels/clock. The SMMs are the bottleneck, not the ROPs.
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people are fixating on ROPs. Whilst wrong, they arent the issue. SMs are the bottle neck and guess what... we already knew about them.


It seems, from the diagram released, that it's the disabled L2 cache to blame for these issues. That, we didnt know about.
 
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Axil said:
Could Gibbo or Bailey be able to help me with some info regarding RMAs

I have a MSI 970GTX purchased September from OcUK . Just before Xmas it developed an issue where the fans do not spin down after gaming. This appears to be erratic and driver dependent as some drivers only exhibit the behavior after heavy usage whereas other drivers it occurs after any spin up. I contacted MSI and after they attempted a fix via bios (didn't work) they've said I should contact the retailer.

With all the stuff going around about the 970GTX memory issues and RMA, Would the issue I'm having be considered RMA and if so How do I get a RMA number

Thanks in Advance
Click to expand...

If the card is faulty we can RMA it for you for inspection and testing. As per the other obvious 970 topic as myself and gibbo have stated before anything is actioned we are awaiting an official response from Nvidia directly.

Please be patient in this matter, we are doing all we can.

Myself and Gibbo and the support staff are here to help people

Bailey
 
AtreuS said:
yes but its not 256bit over the 4gb is it? that is the issue... on the box it says 256bit .... it isnt.

Im not trying to be annoying but this is the crux of the matter at hand. Anyway i guess we wait and see what nvidia have to say :p

As for the dropped call... i phoned at about 10ish and spoke to someone who put me throught to returns... the phone beeped i heard some background noise and the call dropped. So with hindsight i will say its more likely a dropped call rather than someone putting it down on me, for which i aplogise for my earlier statement.
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The Box on my Infinity says the same thing. Now that is open to interpretation and would make interesting arguments if people wanted to take matters further.

Companies (which include the Manufacture and Retailer) need to advertise products with Descriptions that truly\accurately reflect the product at the time of Sale. They, also, need to be easy enough to understand for the laymen (in this case none Technical bods). We should not need to know the logical design of nVidia's GM204 Processor implemented in the GTX970 to fully understand what the 256 bit bus is or how it is split.

Currently, all advertising for the GTX970 says it has a 256 bit bus across the whole 4G of RAM - which is how the layman would read it. This where they and their Agents (retailers who sold them) may become unstuck.

Current advertising does not say this:

224 bit across 3.5G and then 32 bit on the remaining 512mb for a total of 256 bit bus memory subsystem. Which is now the actual Specs of the Card as publicly announce as an correction a couple of days ago.

Now, the problem for nVidia is that they did not state (not that I can find anyway) that the 'total' bus width is 256 bit split into two subsections. And from looking at the spec of the Card from the nVidia Web Site they still state a full 256 bit wide bus on 4G of VRAM - no mention of the split brain.

GTX 970 Memory Specs:
7.0 GbpsMemory Clock
4 GBStandard Memory Config
GDDR5Memory Interface
256-bitMemory Interface Width

Source : http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications

As I said above, this is open to the way you read the Specs but as nVidia have now correctly informed the buying Public of the true design (which could be seen a admittance of misleading information to some degree) and misleading being the key word.

Now we are into a interesting situation. One that I'm sure has kept Legal Teams from nVidia and Retailers, alike, busy for the last couple of Days and probably accounts for the delay on any further 'official' response. I'm sure that nVidia and Retailers will try to say that even after the miss-information, the Card still functions very well and there is no real negative effect on performance in light of the omission.

The next update will need to be worded externally carefully to try a mitigate any risk.
 
Gibbo said:
We've got 8 Pack! :D
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Yeah but what happens when you drunk all those?

I can understand where you're coming from Gibbo in regards to refunds but what I'd like to know is what about those of us that are having genuine issues with the card? Last Friday I called up OC and explained my problem and the guy on the other end told me to call back and he'll give me an rma number, stupidly I waited a while to see what was happening and to see if it could be fixed, I called back again this week and for the same issue I'm being told you now won't give me an rma (The call itself was a nightmare which I've highlighted earlier on in the post and kudos to the guy in sales that actually kept me on the line and made sure one of the guys in your rma team actually spoke to me instead of slamming the phone down again. Honestly as good as your customer service is at times everytime I've had to contact your rma team it's been laughable, this includes trying to rma my monitor which I had to call up 3-4 times as each time the person I spoke to on the other end took down only part of the fault).

Now we know those issues are because of the way the card is built but some of us bought the card on the original specs and the information that was available including on OC's own website is misleading at best.
Where do we stand on that? Would you as a buyer be happy with this?
 
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Regardless of the merits of this issue, cut Gibbo some slack Mal X! We all know he's a top guy and has consistently come out to support us users (hello 970 reference with reduced coil whine).
 
UPDATE 1/27/15 @ 5:36pm ET: [I wanted to clarify a point on the GTX 970's ability to access both the 3.5GB and 0.5GB pools of data at the same. Despite some other outlets reporting that the GPU cannot do that, Alben confirmed to me that because the L2 has multiple request busses, the 7th L2 can indeed access both memories that are attached to it at the same time.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970
 
You guys should drop the whole Dying Light discussion the game is probably what Witcher 3 is going to be in March.

It will kill any card you throw at it.

For playable framerates without to many dips you are going to be running all Nvidia Gameworks crap OFF and AA OFF

SLI profile is total ass , I played for a little over an hour and I thought my eyes where going to blow up.]

Here are some of my results (this will be on my website btw later today if you want to read the full benchmark)

1080p Single GTX970

Texture Quality High, Shadow Map High, Foliage High Ambient Occlusion ON the rest OFF
Min-Avg-Max
55-69-95

1440 Single GTX970

Texture Quality Med, Shadow Map Med, Foliage Med Ambient Occlusion ON the rest OFF
Min-Avg-Max
61-71-80

4K Single GTX970

Texture Quality Low, Shadow Map Low, Foliage Low Ambient Occlusion ON the rest OFF
Min-Avg-Max
37-50-60


SLI is totally **** even with the new drivers and profile if over 1080p my eyes are still burning
 
james.miller said:
UPDATE 1/27/15 @ 5:36pm ET: [I wanted to clarify a point on the GTX 970's ability to access both the 3.5GB and 0.5GB pools of data at the same. Despite some other outlets reporting that the GPU cannot do that, Alben confirmed to me that because the L2 has multiple request busses, the 7th L2 can indeed access both memories that are attached to it at the same time.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970
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so if they could enable the missing L2 cache it would solve all the problems? I wonder if they are laser cut or if a new bios might re-enable it?
 
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