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

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 09:59

I am quite clued up when it comes to GPUs and when I have bought any of my hardware, I tend to look at what it can do. For a GPU, I rely on review sites bench tests and see what is what. I check several sites so I am well informed but I can honestly say that I have never bought a card because of the amount of ROPs it has. I buy a card that can cope in games.

Some of these new tech people demanding they were mis-sold a card because the ROPs are different to what they were lead to belive (led?) and the last 0.5GB runs a little slower "at times" in some games do make me chuckle.

old gamer · 27 Jan 2015 at 09:59

DazQ87 said:
TBH all nividia need to do to keep me happy would be to send a free game or two (preferably non-ubisoft this time )

wouldnt say no to that myself, mabe were easily pleased

MasterOC · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:01

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...tions-of-geforce-gtx-970-following-a-scandal/

Looks like they'll be changing specs for sale from now on

( sorry if this has been posted )

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:01

stooeh said:
I posted a SoM video at 3.7GB VRAM showing no stuttering but yeah I wouldn't mind seeing some videos of the in game stuttering at 3.5 to 4GB and the settings used.

james.miller said:
and Very much appreciated!

I have asked several times for people to post what issues they are getting in games and post a vid showing or even a screenie of the VRAM used but none

OryxBeisa · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:02

Tried CSGO at these settings for 25 minutes;

Didn't really see any issue at all and, unless I'm checking the wrong thing, didn't see my VRAM usage go over 2000MB (1912MB here).

snips86x · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:04

False Advertisement

After numerous reports claiming that Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card cannot use more than 3.5GB of onboard memory, Nvidia Corp. updated the official specs of the graphics solution. Apparently, the difference between the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 is more significant than Nvidia originally said.
According to a report by PCPerspective, which cites Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU engineering at Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 970 features 56 raster operating pipelines (ROPs) and 1792KB L2 cache, not 64 ROPs and 2MB of cache, as previously reported. In a GeForce GTX 980, each block of L2/ROPs directly communicate through a 32-bit portion of the GM204 memory interface and then to a 512MB section of on-board memory. Since the model GTX 970 lacks part of L2 and ROPs, it cannot effectively use 512MB of 4096MB of onboard GDDR5 memory.
While the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards do carry 4096MB of memory, it is divided into two pools: one pool is 3.5GB, whereas the second one is 0.5GB. The larger, primary pool is given priority and is then accessed in the expected pattern. Since the majority of games do not need more than 3.5GB of memory, no problems occur with the GTX 970. However, in cases when over 3.5GB of memory is required, things get much worse. The 0.5GB of memory in the second pool on the GTX 970 cards is slower than the 3.5GB of memory, but is faster than system memory accessed using the PCI Express bus. As a result, performance may degrade when the 0.5GB pool is used.

eyetrip · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:05

Gregster said:
I am quite clued up when it comes to GPUs and when I have bought any of my hardware, I tend to look at what it can do. For a GPU, I rely on review sites bench tests and see what is what. I check several sites so I am well informed but I can honestly say that I have never bought a card because of the amount of ROPs it has. I buy a card that can cope in games.

Some of these new tech people demanding they were mis-sold a card because the ROPs are different to what they were lead to belive (led?) and the last 0.5GB runs a little slower "at times" in some games do make me chuckle.

Greg, simply put, had I known the memory config was as we now know it is, I would never have chanced buying the cards. At all. Period.

I would likely have stuck to my 290's or plumped for 980's.

There were a number of nvidia features I wanted and like, and yes I like the lower power consumption - but knowing full well I was going to be running higher res, I would not have bought these cards.

ubersonic · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:08

Gregster said:
I have asked several times for people to post what issues they are getting in games and post a vid showing or even a screenie of the VRAM used but none

That's because this issue doesn't affect games noticeably. The reason it shows up in the benchmark is because it's synthetic/artificial, a simple comparison would be a disk benchmark tool manually testing a single drive of a software RAID partition, the result would be noticeably below normal however it wouldn't have any bearing on normal usage.

The reported performance hit when gaming from the memory config is supposed to be 4-6% (compared to what the 970 would have achieved with standard config), I doubt anyone would really notice that.

Personally I don't care, I bought my 970's based on their performance in reviews, this news does nothing to change that and I am still more than happy with them for current and future usage.

whyscotty · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:09

mulpsmebeauty said:
Not everyone can afford to/wants to upgrade their card regularly. There'll be lots of people who bought the 970 as a long term investment.

If by that you mean future proof, no such thing.

MasterOC · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:10

whyscotty said:
If by that you mean future proof, no such thing.

Especially when 500mb is virtually unusable

sprite1275 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:10

So what's happening, Can we send these sh@ 970s back or not?

james.miller · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:11

MasterOC said:
Especially when 500mb is virtually unusable

No.

Mei · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:14

ubersonic said:
That's because this issue doesn't affect games noticeably. The reason it shows up in the benchmark is because it's synthetic/artificial, a simple comparison would be a disk benchmark tool manually testing a single drive of a software RAID partition, the result would be noticeably below normal however it wouldn't have any bearing on normal usage.

The reported performance hit when gaming from the memory config is supposed to be 4-6% (compared to what the 970 would have achieved with standard config), I doubt anyone would really notice that.

no because the bottleneck is not the memory (drive in your compare) its the data path, it can not share the load equally like a raid and depending on the situation, how much work that 512mb needs to do it could be a lot more than 4-6%

its just nothing like this example lol

The Running Man · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:14

james.miller said:
No.

Yes. It's crippled.

Squink · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:14

ubersonic said:
The reported performance hit when gaming from the memory config is supposed to be 4-6% (compared to what the 970 would have achieved with standard config), I doubt anyone would really notice

What about the reported stuttering? Would anyone really notice that, do you think? If their favourite game started stuttering badly?

MasterOC · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:14

james.miller said:
No.

Lol ... couldn't get your opinion across any better

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:15

ubersonic said:
That's because this issue doesn't affect games noticeably. The reason it shows up in the benchmark is because it's synthetic/artificial, a simple comparison would be a disk benchmark tool manually testing a single drive of a software RAID partition, the result would be noticeably below normal however it wouldn't have any bearing on normal usage.

The reported performance hit when gaming from the memory config is supposed to be 4-6% (compared to what the 970 would have achieved with standard config), I doubt anyone would really notice that.

Personally I don't care, I bought my 970's based on their performance in reviews, this news does nothing to change that and I am still more than happy with them for current and future usage.

Yer, that's the thing. If it played games to the extent of me being happy, I seriously wouldn't care. My math is bad but 60 fps returned would be ~63.4 on a best case scenario and if someone can see an extra 3.4 fps, they are far better than me.

I see the whole debate as a non issue and I would happily keep a 970 if I had one.

As for those who play at 4K on a 970, turn the settings down or get a bigger VRAM card and get 3 of them if you want to max settings out. 4K requires 3 Titans/ 8 GB 290Xs to have max settings in a few AAA titles.

Edit:

Please stop saying that 0.5GB is unusable. It clearly is usable but just runs a touch slower than the other 7/8ths of the memory (4-6% slower).

ED209 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:17

OryxBeisa said:
Tried CSGO at these settings for 25 minutes;

Didn't really see any issue at all and, unless I'm checking the wrong thing, didn't see my VRAM usage go over 2000MB (1912MB here).

when i get the issues in CSGO i have been playing continuously for a good few hours.

i can normally be on my 3rd match when i start to get the issues.

Stas823 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:18

I honestly wouldn't have bought the 970's if I knew that they were less than 4gb VRAM. Nvidia need to do something about this its their fault not benchmarks/software.

ED209 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:18

Gregster said:
I have asked several times for people to post what issues they are getting in games and post a vid showing or even a screenie of the VRAM used but none

i would be more than happy to post a screen shot when the issue happens but i don't know what software to use or how to get the details on the screen to show this.

if you or anyone else can help i don't mind giving it a try