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

[Mal X]

They're just a corporation. A business, and this is what businesses do to make money.

Look at people's reaction to the 9x0 series FFS. People selling their 780s, 290s etc just to have one. It's called delirium.

Right from the start I knew full well what 9x0 was. It was a repeat of 6x0. Mid range cards being passed off with over sized coolers and sold at high end prices. I paid £350 or more for my first 670. Looking at how it was built? it was worth half that.

People thought the 970, at its price point, was too good to be true.

Well no excrement, Sherlock, it was.

you're talking Krap, the 970 SLI is flipping miles better than the 7990 or the 7970............ you just cant compare the cards, it's cooler, quieter, less power, much faster.........looks better !

but having said that i'm pretty cross right now and deffo thinking about dumping them soon

 

[opethdisciple]

Where have Nvidia official recognised this?

 

[Rangerjr1]

you're talking Krap, the 970 SLI is flipping miles better than the 7990 or the 7970............ you just cant compare the cards, it's cooler, quieter, less power, much faster.........looks better !

but having said that i'm pretty cross right now and deffo thinking about dumping them soon

Guys you heard it here first, it uses LESS power AND LOOKS BETTER.

PHUAAAARK

 

[ALXAndy]

GK110s, beast graphics cards. But these 900 series cards have made a new breed of uneducated fanbois who read all these 970 vs 290 threads where people will say 970 ALL DAY. It has led me to hate these cards with a passion, not to mention the gimped bus width.

And as much as people hate to admit it (and wont 90% of the time) firestrike reflects gameplay performance to a certain extent and 290xs and 290s seem to score better on average, atleast my cards do .

As much as I hate AMD's drivers (don't worry, I pretty much hate everything equally) I've not stopped recommending the 290. Heck, I even bought a 290 (though admittedly it was only £130). On its own ? it was a fine card. When testing it I played BF4 for about three hours and was very impressed with it and that was just a stock card.

Fact is Nvidia have pulled a fast one and have been caught with their pants down. Whether it will put people off? well, your typical reaction is just like the AMD fans when Crossfire was exposed as broken buggy rubbish. They just said "Well never mind, I'm sure they'll fix it" whilst quickly forgetting that up until then they'd been completely conned into buying multiple GPU systems that simply did not function.

I bought a set of 5770s and it was the worst experience I have ever had with any graphics cards. It literally put me off for life. But these companies have fans, who in their eyes can do absolutely no wrong.

Sad fact of life really. Me? haha ! if I'd bought a set of 970s or even three I would already be seeking legal action and making sure I got every penny back that I'd spent on them, given they're not fit for purpose (being a 4gb card that breaks when you use over 3.5gb).

 

[crinkleshoes]

I just realised something...

If the 970's memory problem was due to some reason of how it was cut down from the 980...what about the new 960? I mean if they were cut down using the same method, would they also potentially have the problem of memory bandwidth taking a dive, when memory usage exeed 87.5% of the total capacity (1.75GB)?

No... the 960 is half of the 980 in regards to shaders, ram volume and ram bus width.

It is sold as a 128bit card with 2gb ram... it's half of a 980 chip with half of the ram.

So that ram will use the full 128bit width... suggesting they used the same process as a 970... which is also suggestion they should have sold the 970 as a 208bit/3.3GB card

 

[ALXAndy]

Where have Nvidia official recognised this?

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Responds-GTX-970-35GB-Memory-Issue

The GeForce GTX 970 is equipped with 4GB of dedicated graphics memory. However the 970 has a different configuration of SMs than the 980, and fewer crossbar resources to the memory system. To optimally manage memory traffic in this configuration, we segment graphics memory into a 3.5GB section and a 0.5GB section.

There. What they haven't said, however, is what happens when you actually go over 3.5gb and try and use the last 500mb.

 

[Kaapstad]

AMD gets a lot of flak for their coolers, but atleast we get fully functional RAM, PCBs and Cores. And are advertised as such,

You must have shares in Elpida.

 

[Rangerjr1]

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Responds-GTX-970-35GB-Memory-Issue

The GeForce GTX 970 is equipped with 4GB of dedicated graphics memory. However the 970 has a different configuration of SMs than the 980, and fewer crossbar resources to the memory system. To optimally manage memory traffic in this configuration, we segment graphics memory into a 3.5GB section and a 0.5GB section.

There. What they haven't said, however, is what happens when you actually go over 3.5gb and try and use the last 500mb.

Optimal memory management = Something that looks like my 7970 overclocked to 1400 on water.

 

[Mei]

lol

 

[Rangerjr1]

You must have shares in Elpida.

Yea well, they work at stock and low low OCs

 

[Legend]

OK, so how does this work exactly... are ALL 970's by and large the same under the skin... are they built by Nvidia and sent out to their board partners, who then brand them up, add coolers etc.? What about the OCUK 970 reference, which has guaranteed Samsung memory. Do they add that separately? In which case does that make it superior to another 970 in regard to this VRAM issue, or is it something ELSE in the card which determines how that memory is accessed?

 

[Mei]

and i think u must be a nvidia insider kaap!
u bought the 2 cards not affected 960 & 980

 

[crinkleshoes]

of course it does, it's a perfect comparison. people were complaining because their 16gb iphones only had somewhere 11gb of free storage, as an example. Rightly so too, that takes the mickey somewhat. So yes perfect comparison wto your argument, but that doesn't matter anyway since you can use 4gb. The question here is why does performance tank over 3.6gb, not why cant we use it all. You seem to be ignoring this.

That's not really a fair comparison though now, is it?

Comparing the iphone using space for it's OS is like windows 8.1 eating up 30+GB on a PC with a 120GB SSD...

The only close(ish) comparison I can think of would be selling a PC with 4GB system ram and 32 bit windows that usually can only access 3.5GB of that as a 4GB PC. You have 4GB, but that remaining 0.5GB is useless to you.

It's buying a barebones system with a 40GB hard drive to find out it is really 35GB (before format).

Those are the closest comparisons I can think of...

you dont need to quote the screenshots every time you respond to me


I'll explain once more. I compared Legend's argument to the situation we had with the release of the latest galaxy phones and iPhones because people in this thread (Legend being one of them) are claiming that the last 500mb or so of ram is simply unavailable. This was the case with the phones where the OS took up so much of the advertised storage (in the case of the 16gb models). So very similar situation. Phones got released and people got angry, but did apple/samsung do anything about it? nope. No lawsuits, class action or any of that rubbish. Now, never mind the fact the phones lost far more storage that what was being claimed here; the real difference here is that the ram IS very much much available, as the last couple of screenshots in this thread show. So, again, that argument is silly and needs to be dropped.

The performance issue, the issue you brought up in the first post, is very real however, as i have maintained so no- again, I am not in denial of anything. Perhaps i'm just trying to be too rationing in a forum full of hotheads.

This is not a valid comparison... all that memory was available only a portion was currently in-use.

In this case the memory is not acceptably usable along with allocation and apparently access bandwidth being mis-sold.

 

[ALXAndy]

Are you a lawyer? Obviously not. If this snowballs, your argument is deeply flawed on every level. I don't know how many times it needs to be said, but if the card cannot utilise 4GB RAM without falling over itself, then you do not have 4GB of usable RAM, because once you get over 3.5 and a game tries to access the remaining 0.5, it will stutter and (can) become unplayable. How is this remotely acceptable? As more games demand that level of RAM, this problem is only going to escalate... GTAV people? A storm is coming...

Whoah whoah, relax man. I'm not trying to defend Nvidia at all.

It's totally not acceptable at all. What I'm doing is just reiterating what Nvidia said there. IE - it accesses 3.5gb, then the other 500mb badly. Well, they didn't exactly say that but hey, that's what happens !

I hate Nvidia so much I can't even put it into words. In fact, my hatred for companies such as Nvidia is probably more than AMD, but AMD's drivers don't work for me and that's pretty much the reason why I still suffer being ripped off by Nvidia.

I wish companies like Number Nine were still around. But sadly they were all beaten out by Nvidia's marketing department. The same one they used for the 970.....

 

[Marine-RX179]

you're talking Krap, the 970 SLI is flipping miles better than the 7990 or the 7970............ you just cant compare the cards, it's cooler, quieter, less power, much faster.........looks better !

Seriously...I fail to see the reasoning comparing SLI 970 to 7990 and 7970, when they have nothing in common...?

The 670 was was cooler, more power efficient, faster than the 580, but I don't recall people going crazy selling off their 580 and upgrade to the 670. People who already owned 290/290x/780/780Ti switching to 970 is very strange behaviour indeed!

 

[Rangerjr1]

Seriously...I fail to see the reasoning comparing SLI 970 to 7990 and 7970, when they have nothing in common...?

The 670 was example was cooler, faster than the 580, but I don't recall people going crazy selling off their 580 and upgrade to the 670. People who already owned 290/290x/780/780Ti switching to 970 is very strange behaviour indeed!

They have about the same IPC

 

[r7slayer]

Where's gregster these days ?

My guess keeping his nose out of this one. He would get instantly targeted because he only favors the green side of the force! Same for other certain green people who are normally seen in other threads when there is some bad news or downside to something AMD. Kinda funny to be honest seeing them take the backseat in this one lol. Because i know if the shoe was on the other foot hell they would be in that thread giving their two cents!

Anywho from my perspective it appears only certain benchmarks are picking up any performance hits? People testing in games are not seeing any negatives? Well only that certain youtube video of farcry 4 but i refuse to accept a ubisoft game as a standard for testing anything other than acceptable amount of bugs in a game.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK, so how does this work exactly... are ALL 970's by and large the same under the skin... are they built by Nvidia and sent out to their board partners, who then brand them up, add coolers etc.? What about the OCUK 970 reference, which has guaranteed Samsung memory. Do they add that separately? In which case does that make it superior to another 970 in regard to this VRAM issue, or is it something ELSE in the card which determines how that memory is accessed?

The GPU core itself accesses the 4gb in a weird way. It's nothing to do with the memory, the type of memory or the memory clock, dude.

You could put 8gb VRAM on there yet the card will still access it the same. IE - 3.5gb first and if you run out there's 500mb extra on tap, but it runs like poo.

It's the cut down SM in the core of the GPU doing this. You could put 10,000 mhz ram on there yet still the card sees it as two pieces. One 3.5gb chunk, and one 500mb chunk. IE - it doesn't see it as one whole lump of memory, nor address it as such.

 

[Rangerjr1]

My guess keeping his nose out of this one. He would get instantly targeted because he only favors the green side of the force! Same for other certain green people who are normally seen in other threads when there is some bad news or downside to something AMD. Kinda funny to be honest seeing them take the backseat in this one lol. Because i know if the shoe was on the other foot hell they would be in that thread giving their two cents!

Anywho from my perspective it appears only certain benchmarks are picking up any performance hits? People testing in games are not seeing any negatives? Well only that certain youtube video of farcry 4 but i refuse to accept a ubisoft game as a standard for testing anything other than acceptable amount of bugs in a game.

Im sure skyrim or something with a couple of texture mods and ENBs will kill 970s

 

[Kaapstad]

and i think u must be a nvidia insider kaap!
u bought the 2 cards not affected 960 & 980