What about the 970, what is your stance on that?
My understanding is Nvidia said it was a mixup with their marketing department, which is blatantly a lie. They tried it on and got caught.
Nvidia was definitely in the wrong with the 970 but I don;t think it is the ultimate evil the AMD fanboys would have you believe.
The memory issue itself is pretty minor. The main issue is actually the it only had 56 ROPS and less L2 cache, which in itslef is completely harmless as that is what cut-down cards do, but Nvidia seemed to indicate that the 980 and 970 were identical. Nvidia gave the specs and info for the full GM204 chip and implied the 970 was the same.
All nvidia had to do was make it clear to reviewers that the provided GM204 specs were only for the 980, and that the 970 is a salvaged part with slightly reduced specs. Who actually cares how how L@ cache or a ROPS a GPU really has, except some computer nerds. The main thing is the performance, which was clearly marked in reviews. There is no obligation to tell anyone the internal structure of the GPU, so Nvidia didn;t have to tell anyone how the 970 looked in tech specs. But they absolutely should not have implied it was identical to the 980, and that is why they admitted their wrong doing and paid out refunds.
The fact that 1/8th of the RAM is slower than the rest is not really a big issue, and I didn't think Nvidia even had to make that explicit. Testing revealed it made no difference, because windows likes to keep a few hundred MB anyway and the driver has some metadata. For all intents and purposes it behaved the same as if all 4GB was the same speed. And that is why people purchased it, because of the performance in benchmarks. Knowing that some memory was slower wouldn't have stopped people buying it, as it was a great performer for the money. Previous cards had a similar memory segregation. The main issue is actually the stated bandwidth in the initial reviews was wrong, so again, false advertising.
I don't know how intentional the errors in the 970 technical specs were. The tech specs were valid for the GM204 GPU. The engineers were not the marketing people so it is absolutely possible to be an accident. Some people claim it was blatant lying and misinformation to sell GPUs, but that doesn't make much sense. The GPUs would sell anyway, as was clearly the case because the 970 went on to be the highest selling mid-range GPU ever. At one point it and something like 4% of the total Steam user base. People buy based on price and performance and ecosystem/brand, not how much L2 cache a GPU has. It is also obvious that the true specs would be discovered pretty quickly anyway, as was inherently the case.
Maybe Nvidia did blatantly try to scam customers, I don't know for sure, but the evidence doesn't exist and logically it doesn't make any sense. Nvidia was still guilty of false advetsiign, hence the class action lawsuit which they settled.