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

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setter said:
What res, (particularly in battlefield)? Ive played it under DSR at 2560x1600 and most vram ive seen used was 2700mb, (3 gb 780's here). All settings maxed, x4 msaa.
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It's at 1440 on one of the new maps not sure which one, hopefully Devrij could help here as he was playing with me.

Dragon Age is in the Hinterlands in the forest where the mages were fighting with the templars.

Shadows of Mordor in the 2nd stage sea of Nurn or whatever it's called.
 
africanos23 said:
I don't think ACU and FC4 are good things to provide accurate performance. I could care less about the NAI Benchmark.

BTW cards with Hynix tend to see the last 0.5GB limitation kick in a little harder. Me included. That is only over a certain threshold.
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because FC4 and AC:U could actually display the issues - you don't think they are a good indication - of a potential problem??
 
Harlequin said:
because FC4 and AC:U could actually display the issues - you don't think they are a good indication - of a potential problem??
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Harlenquin the games have problems that are engine related. Check CPU usage on one of the cores on FC4 (pegged at 100%) that happens even on my R9-290s.

I personally do have problems over 3.5GB @ 4K with SLI GTX970. I wasnt sure about the problem and contacted Scott from Techreport.

I have quite a few games if you guys want me to test anything they are all tested anyway but not on the latest drivers.
 
ICEx21 said:
It's at 1440 on one of the new maps not sure which one, hopefully Devrij could help here as he was playing with me.

Dragon Age is in the Hinterlands in the forest where the mages were fighting with the templars.

Shadows of Mordor in the 2nd stage sea of Nurn or whatever it's called.
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The pearl market map from one of the recent bf4 expansions is an absolute mess with one card or two ive found. Stutters like crazy.

Harlequin said:
because FC4 and AC:U could actually display the issues - you don't think they are a good indication - of a potential problem??
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Tbf, from reading the threads in pc gaming for both theese titles, they run rubbish wether your on amd or nvidia cards. Hence why theyre no good way to judge performance. I call it the ubi effect.
 
Email from 2 weeks ago
Hey Scott

I wasn't sure if this was the right email to send to but anyway.

This is Nikolas from HardwarePal ,
The Tech Report is a lot more analytical and ofcourse you guys are a lot more savvy about things like these, theres seems to be some kind of issue on the GTX970, more info here :

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/nvidi...able-to-efficiently-allocate-more-than-3-5gb/

I've already read one of your older articles here :

http://techreport.com/blog/27143/here-another-reason-the-geforce-gtx-970-is-slower-than-the-gtx-980

In our own benchmarks, I see a very similar situation. I usually use a GTX970 to test VRAM usage. We all know that VRAM usage at the same resolution+preset with different cards will allocate the frame buffer differently, but this is beyond me.
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Hm. You know that, in 32-bit games, you run into a hard memory address space limit at 4GB, right? As I understand it, Windows requires some of that space for things other than VRAM contents, too.

Those reports where folks are unable to go beyond 3.5GB is what I'd expect in games with 32-bit executables.

If there is a problem, you'd have to limit testing to 64-bit games on 64-bit OSes and compare directly to the GTX 980.

Scott
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The guy over at Guru3D http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=396064 seems to have found the problem due to his comparison of the GTX970 vs GTX980 .

I'm probably going to say something stupid :) , thats why I sent you the email (you know better)

The people over at Overclock.net have a discussion about it http://www.overclock.net/t/1535502/gtx-970s-can-only-use-3-5gb-of-4gb-vram-issue.
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Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of all this.

1. Did Nvidia misdescribe the 970? Absolutely. According to Anandtech, "As part of our discussion with NVIDIA, they laid out the fact that the original published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong".

2. How much difference do the disabled ROPs and L2 cache make in practice? According to PC Perspective, "the consensus seems to be something in the 4-6% range".

3. Are 970 owners entitled to a refund? I suspect yes, at least in the EU. EU consumer legislation takes a dim view of misleading advertising.

4. Should 970 owners seek a refund? I'm not sure. It's still a very good card for the money.

5. Should those of us with pre-orders for the OcUK reference 970 cancel? Again, I'm not sure, for the same reason. I'm still undecided whether to go ahead with my pre-order, change the order to a GTX 980 instead or cancel and wait for the next generation of cards from AMD and Nvidia.
 
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Well just finished running through Hitman absolution and using Nvidia Geforce Experience recommended settings, running on a 2560*1080p super wide "according" to GPU-Z my card maxed at ~3.2gb, game play was smooth, stunning if l must say, tomorrow when l get the chance will run through the last scenario with my R9 290X and see what this shows, however very happy with both cards tbh.
 
Ohh dear this thread was on 24 pages last time i looked the other day. Now its jumped to twice that lol. Now seen nVidia has apparently misled people with the specifications? And allowed reviewers to promote those specs to the public and not corrected them... Quite the sly dogs! So actually the card has got full bandwidth as described but only for 3.5gb of Vram then and the other 500mb was actually far less than current described specs?

I can understand why people have reported problems i guess and why there are quite a few angry peeps. Can't believe nVidia tried to write it off to just monitoring programs not correctly reading mem utilisation. I actually believed this as well! More fool me for trusting nVidia...
 
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handsomejesus said:
Do I return my 970? I'll be gaming on 1080p probably till September..
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1080p should be fine for a good 2 years imo. The memory allocation is quite good.

If your future-proofing for big AAA titles at 1440p max eye candy it might not be the best option.

If your going 4K SLI you will probably be hitting the VRAM a lot sooner than true 4GB cards.

All in all the cards still have stellar performance and are on my recommended list.

Sadly I bought them to sidegrade from my R9-290s for 4K, to get a little less heat output.
 
james.miller said:
Oh wind your neck in. Do you even understand what you're saying? the 970 chips (most, perhaps not all) are rejected 980's with faulty blocks. turning them in to 970's , rather than chucking them in the bin, is the very definition of cost cutting and it's a common, sensible business practice. I'll ask you the same question i asked somebody else in this thread; what you you rather nvidia do? design a complete bespoke die just for the 970 and take the hit in tooling costs and profit?

No, you wouldn't.
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Not release a card that has 512MB of gimped VRAM and then have the audacity to try to spin up some bullcrap in an attempt to cover it up.
 
mulpsmebeauty said:
Probably not worth the hassle. If you were keeping it for a couple more years then maybe.
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africanos23 said:
1080p should be fine for a good 2 years imo. The memory allocation is quite good.

If your future-proofing for big AAA titles at 1440p max eye candy it might not be the best option.

If your going 4K SLI you will probably be hitting the VRAM a lot sooner than true 4GB cards.

All in all the cards still have stellar performance and are on my recommended list.

Sadly I bought them to sidegrade from my R9-290s for 4K, to get a little less heat output.
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Yeah, thanks. I'll be building a new rig in Sept/Nov so I'll either go for SLI or my SO can inherit it. I'll keep, the card does have brilliant performance.
 
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