Soldato
Thanks for that. Interesting.
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970's having performance issues using 4GB Vram - Nvidia investigating
- Thread starter kitch9
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Thanks for that. Interesting.
Associate
My opinion:
So basically what that means is that the first 3.5GB probably has access to the full resources of the card and that the last 0.5GB which is segmented from the 3.5GB only has access to a limited amount of resources which would explain the performance drop > 3.5GB because the last 0.5GB has significantly less bandwidth than the rest of the RAM. Essentially what they are saying is that the 970 only really can handle 3.5GB at full performance because of the SM/Crossbar setup differences between the 970 and 980.
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Associate
Ofcourse why would they mislead us, its not like they are selling a hobbled product.
Associate
From Guru3D, makes sense
Soldato
Looks hobbled to me.
Associate
Never been the most patient person in the world. What the hell are Nvidia going to do about this I wonder.
Man of Honour
They have told no lies have they.
Also when you say hobbled product from their point of view it could mean on the 9 series
256 bit bus
Using data compression
4gb of VRAM instead of more
Below par coolers on the reference cards
And the list goes on
The above sounds a lot worse than it really is but the bottom line is NVidia have built the 970 and 980 with a lot of compromises as these are not going to be the top of the range flagships. NVidia will see how the VRAM works on the 970 as yet another compromise.
Even despite this ongoing problem the GTX 970 is still a very good card with a lot of happy users, well worth recommending to everyone.
That's not the whole issue.
Both the GTX980 and 970 have 4 raster engines, each with 4 SMM units. On the 970 3 of the 16 SMM units are disabled, the issue arises if all 3 disabled SMM units are from the same raster engine rather than one from each of the first three; which people are speculating is the case.
They have told no lies have they.
Also when you say hobbled product from their point of view it could mean on the 9 series
256 bit bus
The above sounds a lot worse than it really is but the bottom line is NVidia have built the 970 and 980 with a lot of compromises as these are not going to be the top of the range flagships. NVidia will see how the VRAM works on the 970 as yet another compromise.
Even despite this ongoing problem the GTX 970 is still a very good card with a lot of happy users, well worth recommending to everyone.
The way the 970 is cut down appears to effectively lower the memory bus below the 256bit required for 4gb of vram, to around 208bit
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They can't recall. They simply can't. It wouldn't bankrupt them by any means, they could certainly afford it... but it would a massive admission of guilt, their share price would tank and they'd send every potential new customer running in to the open arms of AMD. You'd be seeing it on the 10 o'clock news, and they won't let that happen. So... they'll either fix it via firmware update, or lock their team of overpaid lawyers in a room working overtime with their smartest tech minds until they come up with a way out that basically screws us all but protects them. The fact most of us won't ever buy Nvidia again won't matter much, as ultimately this is the best case scenario for them if there's no fix.
Caporegime
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Wow, sounding like a hobbled product to me! I certainly wouldn't be happy, class action anyone!??? 
My bet is that they'll squirm out of it using legal language
My bet is that they'll squirm out of it using legal language
Man of Honour
This makes sense as the chips that don't get used on the 980s could have defective/disabled SMM units anywhere.
I am on the verge of calling 'Nvidia plant' to anyone who takes this line of rhetoric... it's such a ridiculous thing to say, and TOTALLY beside the point.They have told no lies have they.
Man of Honour
As I said above NVidia would see this as another compromise for the 9 series.
The 256bit bus is there, it is just not working the way it should which is not good.
Man of Honour
No
It is totally the point as we need to stick to the facts.
I would also like to remind you that I have been the biggest critic of the NVidia 9 series on these forums right back to launch day when I was in a minority of one.
The problem is that it's not there. That is what's causing the problems! once vram usage goes above 3.5GB there is insufficient bandwidth in the memory bus causing rapid loss of throughput and stuttering. Which wouldn't occur if the full 256bit bus width was available.
Associate
Latest Nvidia BIOS was released 2 days ago, and doesn't mention this fix
http://www.gigabyte.eu/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5209#bios
It's also available for 980 G1 as well, updated the BIOS earlier on both cards and it seems fine so far.
The 980 G1 fix was only to "Improve compatibility with some monitors".
Caporegime
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" NVIDIA’s focus is on the performance ramifications – mainly, that there generally aren’t any..."
Yet from users feedback in games that are accessing that 0.5GB of RAM, they are reporting clear and obvious performance issues, so if true would make this statement totally false and basically a lie.
Yet from users feedback in games that are accessing that 0.5GB of RAM, they are reporting clear and obvious performance issues, so if true would make this statement totally false and basically a lie.
Man of Honour
Or users could be trying to run a game/settings that needs more than 4gb which would make a 980 perform badly as well.
More testing needs to be done in a more scientific way than it has been done so far.
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