Closing Thoughts
Bringing things to a close, I must admit I was a bit taken aback when NVIDIA first told us that they needed to correct the specifications for the GTX 970. We’ve had NVIDIA decline to disclose sensitive information before only to reveal it later, but they’ve never had to do something quite like this before. In retrospect these new specifications make more sense given the performance and device specs we’re seeing, but it certainly is going to leave egg on NVIDIA’s face as this never should have happened in the first place.
As for the GTX 970’s underlying memory configuration and memory allocation techniques, this is going to be a more difficult matter to bring closure to. Without question the GTX 970’s unusual memory configuration introduces a layer of complexity that isn’t there with the GTX 980, and as a result it’s extremely difficult to quantify better and worse in this case. It’s worse than the GTX 980 – and it is a lower tier card after all – but how much worse is no longer an easy answer to provide.
At its heart the GTX 970’s configuration is a compromise between GPU yields, card prices, and memory capacity. The easiest argument to make in that regard is that it should have shipped with a full 64 ROP configuration and skipped all of these complexities entirely. But on the whole and looking at the options for configurations without this additional complexity, a 3GB/48 ROP GTX 970 would have been underspeced, and with so much of the GTX 970’s success story being NVIDIA’s ability to launch the card at $329 I’m not sure if the other option is much better. At least on paper this looks like the best compromise NVIDIA could make.
In the end while I am disappointed that these details haven’t come out until now, I am satisfied that we now finally have enough information in hand to truly understand what’s going on with the GTX 970 and what its strengths and weaknesses are as a result of memory segmentation. Meanwhile for real world performance, right now this is an ongoing test with the GTX 970. As the highest-profile card to use memory segmentation it’s the first time NVIDIA has been under the microscope like this, but it’s far from the first time they’ve used this technology. But so far with this new information we have been unable to break the GTX 970, which means NVIDIA is likely on the right track and the GTX 970 should still be considered as great a card now as it was at launch. In which case what has ultimately changed today is not the GTX 970, but rather our perception of it.
