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

dewi · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:34

almighty15 said:
They all read review on there own products and anyone with half a brain would have noticed that petty much every review mentioned 64 ROP's and no one internally Nvidia bought that up in a meeting?

Exactly

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:34

Gregster said:
Here is a tip for those having issues with stuttering and usage on a 970 showing 3.5GB or over - Turn down the AA a little till the stuttering stops and you will be golden. If a game uses more than the 4GB of VRAM 'which is usable', then that is where you will see the problems of stutter.

Just in case people don't know what to do when they go over the 4GB threshold.

Mei · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:36

turn down your settings? genius!
lolz

alex_123_fra · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:36

I severely doubt nvidia will care much about the minority who actually notice/read boards and care about this sort of issue. Most will never even notice the issue with the final 0.5MB VRam as they won't play at sufficiently high resolutions or settings.

I also doubt anyone will have success receiving a refund under "false advertising", although I will be pleasantly surprised if that happens.

ICEx21 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:37

MasterOC said:
understand there probably sick of this issue from phone calls and customers etc but was pretty poor customer service , never had anything like that

It definitely wasn't the best customer service I've had from them, I never even got an explanation why the other guy put the phone down :|

almighty15 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:38

alex_123_fra said:
I severely doubt nvidia will care much about the minority who actually notice/read boards and care about this sort of issue. Most will never even notice the issue with the final 0.5MB VRam as they won't play at sufficiently high resolutions or settings.

I also doubt anyone will have success receiving a refund under "false advertising", although I will be pleasantly surprised if that happens.

Give it 12 months with the new games engines and stuff and you'll be breaking 4Gb use at 1080p

eyetrip · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:39

So Greg, if I am getting a reading of 3.6/3.7GB in AB, and reportedly getting an almost constant 30 fps, the game should be smooth no?

It may not be high fps, but all things considered, should be smooth?

I can tell you, for at least Dragon age, it's a stuttery, awful mess.

I just wish I had the free time to spend my evenings recording videos and uploading, but these days, I pretty much only get some time on my weekends to game.

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:39

almighty15 said:
Give it 12 months with the new games engines and stuff and you'll be breaking 4Gb use at 1080p

Time to upgrade then or turn down settings....

P0tenc · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:39

almighty15 said:
The stupid thing is Nvidia didn't HAVE to disable a L2/ROP partition to reduce the core count of the die.

They could have left all the L2 cache and ROP's in tact and just disabled 3 SM blocks.

They did this to improve yields and reduce cost. It is true they did not have to do it, but I think they had enough chips with one damaged level 2 cache block or ROP that it made sense.

Nvidia made many sensible engineering choices here, that is not in question. However not telling the customer about it...that is sloppy.

I am not happy with 3.5GB! :mad:

ubersonic · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:40

Mei said:
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

/facepalm

Accessing that 500MB of memory on its own is slower. Accessing that 500MB as part of the 4GB total slows things down by 4-6%

NVIDIA claims that the architecture is working exactly as intended and that with competent OS heuristics the performance difference should be negligible in real-world gaming scenarios.

---------------------------------------------

mulpsmebeauty said:
What about the reported stuttering?

Apparently unrelated.

alex_123_fra · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:40

almighty15 said:
Give it 12 months with the new games engines and stuff and you'll be breaking 4Gb use at 1080p

Yes, but by then nvidia will just politely ask you to "come this way sir, here is our brand new GTX 1080 (or whatever they'll call it) with 8GB which will sort out your performance issues.

SS-89 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:41

So Nvidia got the original specs of the card wrong? I can't for certain say any of my issues in sli with stuttering are down to this but it does seem rather underhanded from Nvidia.

In fact the anand article states that if the driver team are doing their job the impact should be minimal so doesn't that mean the driver team have to be aware of the architecture setup which in turn means that Nvidia were likely aware of this?

They also state that Frostbite is an engine which allocates as much as it can from the memory pool and incidentally that is one game in particular I suffer from Fps stuttering despite being locked at 60fps.

Mei · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:43

ubersonic said:
/facepalm

why you face palming me im right!
you couldnt of been more wrong in your example ><

Squink · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:44

alex_123_fra said:
I severely doubt nvidia will care much about the minority who actually notice/read boards and care about this sort of issue.

What about the senior IT buyer at a company who's on the verge of buying 5000 cards? Who might be wavering between nvidia or AMD cards and might just be put off by issues like this appearing? After all, if a company can lie to everyone about 1 card, perhaps there are issues with other cards as well.

NVidia relies on its reputation to pump out cards with a markup over AMD's offerings. You can't buy back your reputation easily when word gets out that you're flogging a product that isn't as advertised.

whyscotty · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:44

mulpsmebeauty said:
You said "futureproof", I distinctly said "long term investment". This could mean 3 or more years in the world of graphics cards. Probably unusual on this forum but probably not unusual elsewhere.

I notice you managed to avoid answering the question about whether it would be fair if this problem shortened the perceived usable life of the card by 6 months.

I asked if you ment future proof.

As for avoiding the question of shortening perceived usable life, I haven't got a crystal ball.

But as I said B4, once your cards starts to struggle you turn settings down or upgrade.

P0tenc · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:44

To all those saying they are not noticing any issue.

This is because Nvidia are using clever algorithms to only put data into the 0.5GB portion that will not be accessed frequently.

This is dynamic behaviour, and when it fails (and it will from time to time) there will be a noticeable performance drop.

If you guys are happy with that then so be it, but this is not what I paid for.

almighty15 · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:46

Gregster said:
Time to upgrade then or turn down settings....

If the card can handle all the shaders but running the textures a notch up causes issues...

Then what as that'll be related to this BS memory issue and not the core running out of puff.

razorpakk · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:46

alex_123_fra said:
I severely doubt nvidia will care much about the minority who actually notice/read boards and care about this sort of issue. Most will never even notice the issue with the final 0.5MB VRam as they won't play at sufficiently high resolutions or settings.

I also doubt anyone will have success receiving a refund under "false advertising", although I will be pleasantly surprised if that happens.

People who buy dedicated graphic cards are the same who research these kind of things, so the majority of 970s owners should now be aware.

I would actually be surprised if Nvidia isn't forced to accept the cards back, this situation is false advertising 101.
I bought the cards for The Witcher 3, If I had known it had "only" 3.5gb I would have probably got two 980s, which would've been even better for Nvidia...

Gregster · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:46

eyetrip said:
So Greg, if I am getting a reading of 3.6/3.7GB in AB, and reportedly getting an almost constant 30 fps, the game should be smooth no?

It may not be high fps, but all things considered, should be smooth?

I can tell you, for at least Dragon age, it's a stuttery, awful mess.

I just wish I had the free time to spend my evenings recording videos and uploading, but these days, I pretty much only get some time on my weekends to game.

I just did a google search for Drangon Age Inquisition and seems you are not alone. nVidia and AMD having stuttering issues and memory leaks with Mantle. I would look to the game bud. I do feel at times that we can be swayed to thinking it is something and we look to that to solve it.

What happens when you set everything to low in the settings?

whyscotty · 27 Jan 2015 at 10:47

~>Dg<~ said:
why are people buying 970s for 4k anyway

lets be realistic they are 1080 cards for maxing games.

Stop talking sense