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

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DarkBahamut said:
Yes, people are having a panic attack over not having 4.5GB video memory :p.

When running a non full screen application, whatever process that wishes to use video memory has to compete with whatever other processes are already using video memory, such as Aero, GPU accelerated web browsers (including HTML/CEF applications like Spotify), video players, etc.

My system on the desktop is using 436MB GPU memory, which is not released when demand is high. So if I run the same benchmark on my 780, once it hits 2550MB my bandwidth drops super low, because the card is out video memory and has to access main memory to finish the benchmark. This is not a driver bug and it is not a hardware issue.

I'd be interested to see a benchmark result from a 970 system that has released all it's allocated VRAM before running this benchmark. People just downloading the tool and running it then complaining about the resulting slow speed in the last ~500MB are only providing the expected result.

You can even see in the screenshot posted on page 1 that the 970 result has aero enabled, and the 980 result has aero disabled :o
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Would be interesting to see if random reads from high address locations in VRAM exhibit it or if it only happens if you allocate the VRAM fully and keep trying to read from random locations.

Bonjour said:
There's a reasonable dissection of the Nai's tool over at Guru 3D. They seem to think it's not related to Aero.
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For the 970s it doesn't look like it but the reports from people with 780tis appear at face value to most likely be due to other stuff using video memory.
 
DarkBahamut said:
Yes, people are having a panic attack over not having 4.5GB video memory :p.

When running a non full screen application, whatever process that wishes to use video memory has to compete with whatever other processes are already using video memory, such as Aero, GPU accelerated web browsers (including HTML/CEF applications like Spotify), video players, etc.

My system on the desktop is using 436MB GPU memory, which is not released when demand is high. So if I run the same benchmark on my 780, once it hits 2550MB my bandwidth drops super low, because the card is out video memory and has to access main memory to finish the benchmark. This is not a driver bug and it is not a hardware issue.

I'd be interested to see a benchmark result from a 970 system that has released all it's allocated VRAM before running this benchmark. People just downloading the tool and running it then complaining about the resulting slow speed in the last ~500MB are only providing the expected result.

You can even see in the screenshot posted on page 1 that the 970 result has aero enabled, and the 980 result has aero disabled :o
Click to expand...


Which is exactly why you run it when using the iGPU so that the load on the 970 is 0%.
 
Is the iGPU test only showing this fault on the 970 then? Is there any indication this is hardware or software, or is that simply impossible to tell either way?
 
ReCoN1989 said:
Yes it is only on the 970, it is suspected to be related to the way the 970 is a cut down version which would mean a hardware fault. I copied a more detailed explanation earlier from overlockers.net.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=27522350&postcount=55
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Well that's interesting, and if true seems obvious to me that the card has been deliberately hamstrung, and we've been blatently mis-sold a product that simply cannot do what it says on the tin. This doesn't bode well.
 
Legend said:
Well that's interesting, and if true seems obvious to me that the card has been deliberately hamstrung, and we've been blatently mis-sold a product that simply cannot do what it says on the tin. This doesn't bode well.
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If it is true, nVidia are in BIG trouble. I doubt they would have purposefully done this, because there is always a come back and someone always picks up on these things but that doesn't excuse the poor QC for allowing it to go out like that. That's of course if it isn't a driver fault and is in fact hardware related.

We will find out anyways and no hiding for nVidia on this.
 
Gregster said:
If it is true, nVidia are in BIG trouble. I doubt they would have purposefully done this, because there is always a come back and someone always picks up on these things but that doesn't excuse the poor QC for allowing it to go out like that. That's of course if it isn't a driver fault and is in fact hardware related.

We will find out anyways and no hiding for nVidia on this.
Click to expand...

I agree, that if true, Nvidia are in a mess and that it's insane to think it was released on the hope that nobody would run into a scenario when 3GB> of Vram is being used. I can't see this happening but we'll just have to wait and see.
 
I think people should look more closely at the GTX 980 as well. The drop in performance as the resolution goes up on these cards hints that this may not be the end of the story.

I have been saying for a very long time this sort of thing is a hardware limitation and not something a driver update can cure.
 
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