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

Gibbo · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:00

RusstheDroog said:
Would the stuttering issue be solved with Gsync? I'm guessing not...

Yes according to Loki on here, he has no stuttering with his 970 SLI's on G-Sync. Maybe he can reply with more information.

Silent_Scone · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:04

Neil79 said:
Well said...

Although Nvidia really **** up, there is no excuse for games such as Dying Light to use 6GB - 8GB of Ram or 4GB of Vram and higher, that's just shoddy optimizing. There is also the issue with Ass Creed Unity, again shoddy optimizing.

Are you a developer? Texture resolution in ACU is fairly high. The PS4 can allocate as much as 4gb for graphics alone from its unified memory. increasing the pixel count is only going to push that further. ACU actually performs admirably now.

RusstheDroog · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:18

Gibbo said:
Yes according to Loki on here, he has no stuttering with his 970 SLI's on G-Sync. Maybe he can reply with more information.

Haha, you know I'm just dying to spend my money on those Dual 970s.

Maybe i'll ping the bey a private message.

StrongSad · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:25

Silent_Scone said:
Are you a developer? Texture resolution in ACU is fairly high. The PS4 can allocate as much as 4gb for graphics alone from its unified memory. increasing the pixel count is only going to push that further. ACU actually performs admirably now.

I was running ACU** yesterday and it was using 4Gb of memory on my 980 (1080)

When I had my 970 it was using 3.5Gb on the same settings it is now, (Nvidia experience optimisation)

I would be interested to see if that is the case with everybody else as well.

**not playing just running around like a loon as I have No idea what I am doing

ubersonic · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:27

Neil79 said:
Well said...

Although Nvidia really **** up, there is no excuse for games such as Dying Light to use 6GB - 8GB of Ram or 4GB of Vram and higher, that's just shoddy optimizing. There is also the issue with Ass Creed Unity, again shoddy optimizing.

Indeed, it seems "console port" is another way of saying "badly made", though anyone who has ever played a Halo or Rockstar game on the PC already knew that XD

Perfect_Chaos · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:36

old gamer said:
and the only blackscreen i got was overclocking the memory to far, infact my 970's did also

I would go with this, same happened on my 970 and it has disappeared so far after i lowered the clocks a bit.

Still thinking of sending it back before end of the month though.

Legend · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:39

JamesM said:
...lets not forget that games will only begin to use more and more VRAM in the future so 970 owners may only notice the issues on one or two games currently but in the future, X amount of months down the line, that 3.5GB of VRAM will show it's weakness time and time again.

This is the key point from all of this... and it's a massive unknown. A year from now 970 SLI users may be happily chugging along with optimised drivers and stutter-free gaming... or they could be cursing the day they decided not to return their cards when they had the opportunity. Either way, it's a gamble. For anyone with a single card at 1080p and no plans to SLI I'd still advise to keep it, but otherwise, personally, it seems more of a risk than is worth taking.

Perfect_Chaos · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:52

Gibbo said:
Yes according to Loki on here, he has no stuttering with his 970 SLI's on G-Sync. Maybe he can reply with more information.

From what I've read through google searches i can't find any evidence that G-Sync fixes micro stuttering at all, if it really did then i'm sure it'd be all over the net.. and it isn't, would be nice if true though.

Silent_Scone · 10 Feb 2015 at 11:59

Strudders said:
I was running ACU** yesterday and it was using 4Gb of memory on my 980 (1080)

When I had my 970 it was using 3.5Gb on the same settings it is now, (Nvidia experience optimisation)

I would be interested to see if that is the case with everybody else as well.

**not playing just running around like a loon as I have No idea what I am doing

3rd party monitoring cannot be trusted on the 970 due to the nature of the memory sub system, as discovered.

~>Dg<~ · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:09

Legend said:
This is the key point from all of this... and it's a massive unknown. A year from now 970 SLI users may be happily chugging along with optimised drivers and stutter-free gaming... or they could be cursing the day they decided not to return their cards when they had the opportunity. Either way, it's a gamble. For anyone with a single card at 1080p and no plans to SLI I'd still advise to keep it, but otherwise, personally, it seems more of a risk than is worth taking.

thing is dx12 and optimization

many people haven't thought about that.nvidia cards seems to benefit very well.

Neil79 · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:14

~>Dg<~ said:
thing is dx12 and optimization many people haven't thought about that.nvidia cards seems to benefit very well.

That's why I went to the 980 GTX... Even though Nvidia screwed up, I am no AMD fan

LoadsaMoney · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:15

ICEx21 said:
290 black screen is a fault where as the 970 stutter is the way it was designed in regards to the memory which was also not revealed by Nvidia until it was discovered by others months after launch.

Yeah the 290 black screen was an actual fault, not a design feature

easyrider · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:25

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...t-admit-guilt-of-the-geforce-gtx-970-scandal/

StrongSad · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:28

Silent_Scone said:
3rd party monitoring cannot be trusted on the 970 due to the nature of the memory sub system, as discovered.

Sooo then, we really don't have the accurate memory usage of the 970 then?

JamesM · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:35

Strudders said:
Sooo then, we really don't have the accurate memory usage of the 970 then?

We do, not to sure what the other guy is saying as I can clearly see what my 970's vram usage is when gaming.

If it's below 3500 you should have no problems however once you reach that 3500 limit, if the game starts to stutter at times, then you have reached the Achilles heal of the 970

Locky · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:43

Gibbo said:
Yes according to Loki on here, he has no stuttering with his 970 SLI's on G-Sync. Maybe he can reply with more information.

What Gsync can fix (with tweaking) is micro stutter usually found with Multi gpu setups and also mostly down to the 144hz rate. It won't work out of the box and I tailor every game with different settings and different refresh rates.

People buy multi cards and expect them to work but I find SLI and Crossfire setups more advance but rewards are good.

Custom Bios are the way forward too, for one you can dial in that overclock and two force different power profiles so cards are operating at same voltages instead of fluctuating.

What Gsync can't fix is **** poor game coding and crappy console ports.

Gregster · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:46

Locky said:
What Gsync can fix (with tweaking) it's micro stutter usually found with Multi gpu setups and also mostly down to the 144hz rate. It won't work out of the box and I tailor every game with different settings and different refresh rates.

People buy multi cards and expect them to work but I find SLI and Crossfire setups more advance but rewards are good.

Custom Bios are the way forward too, for one you can dial in that overclock and two force different power profiles so cards are operating at same voltages instead of fluctuating.

What Gsync can't fix is **** poor game coding and crappy console ports.

Spot on.

Some games, no matter what are just not good and no, G-Sync doesn't fix a broken mess but will happily smooth out basic SLI micro stutter and any other normal tearing and judders.

ubersonic · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:50

Legend said:
This is the key point from all of this... and it's a massive unknown. A year from now 970 SLI users may be happily chugging along with optimised drivers and stutter-free gaming... or they could be cursing the day they decided not to return their cards when they had the opportunity. Either way, it's a gamble.

This is the situation I am in, I specifically went 970 SLI because I wanted my rig to last as long as possible before my next upgrade. Had Nvidia been honest with me I would never have considered upgrading to 970 SLI and would have stuck with my GTX780 until Titan2/390X arrived :mad:

The way I see it I have the following options:

RMA both cards and get a decent GTX960 or a used 680/770 to tide me over until the Titan2/390X hit.
RMA both cards and put the 290 from my spare rig into the main one, and hope the noise doesn't cause me to throw the entire system out the window before the Titan2/390X hit.
RMA both cards and get a beefy GTX980 or a used Titan Black and hope they last me a long while.
RMA both cards and get GTX980 SLI.
RMA one card and then run a single GTX970 as long as possible.

Urrgh, lol.

StrongSad · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:50

JamesM said:
We do, not to sure what the other guy is saying as I can clearly see what my 970's vram usage is when gaming.

If it's below 3500 you should have no problems however once you reach that 3500 limit, if the game starts to stutter at times, then you have reached the Achilles heal of the 970

Absolutely,

My point is though, using AS-U, the 970 hits the limit and went no further than 3.6 on my 970 (in AB) yet the 980 hits 4Gb... they have the same Vram installed and should report it as 4Gb, the bottle neck is in the way it uses the last 500mb not the size of the ram installed.

If it is not able to see how that is used, or is not reporting the way it is using it, at what point does the card nip off to sys Ram?

Jarrastafari · 10 Feb 2015 at 12:52

What settings would you suggest 970 SLi+Gsync owners play with Locky?