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Nvidia Corp. on Thursday retracted its promise to improve performance of the GeForce GTX 970 using new drivers. According to the company, one of its representatives made an incorrect statement and there is no new driver with a fix for the graphics card incoming.
As discovered by numerous enthusiasts and confirmed by Nvidia earlier this week, the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card cannot access all four gigabytes of onboard memory at full speed. Due to limitations of the cut-down GM204 graphics processor used on the model GTX 970, only 3.5GB of memory can be accessed with maximum bandwidth, whereas 512MB pool can be accessed at considerably lower speed, which results in performance degradations in certain cases.
On Wednesday it was reported that Nvidia was working on a special driver that would improve performance of the GeForce GTX 970 in certain situations. Unfortunately, while Nvidia is constantly working on new drivers, the company is not working on a special driver that will fix the issue when the GeForce GTX 970 cannot use more than 3.5GB efficiently.
“[Performance improvement plan] is not something we have officially said,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in an emailed statement.
The GM204-200 graphics processor used for the GeForce GTX 970 lacks a part of level-two cache as well as features only 56 raster operations pipelines (even though initially Nvidia declared 64 ROPs and full 2MB L2 cache). Due to nature of the Maxwell architecture, 512MB of 4GB onboard memory cannot be accessed at full speed because of such configuration. As a result, Nvidia’s abilities to fix the 3.5GB GeForce GTX 970 memory issue with drivers are limited.
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KitGuru Says: Looks like the memory allocation issue of the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards is not a bug, but rather a feature. As a result, expect new graphics adapters to change specifications of the product on boxes. Besides, Nvidia could reconsider pricing of the GeForce GTX 970 and even provide a compensation for owners in order not to fuel the scandal.
Lied to twice now.
2 for the price of 1!!! nVidia would call that good value 😉
😀
This is why you do not let employees make off-the-cuff remarks during a fiasco like this.
HAHAHAHAHAHA FCKN NVIDIA! GOOD JOB!
Nvidia just keep digging themselves a deeper hole. I may be an AMD fan but I’m starting to get angry. Nobody should be lied to, and yet Nvidia continue to lie. Tits.
The class action lawyers will be rubbing there hands together over this one you can bet on it.
This is what I get for breaking my 3-card AMD/ATI streak. Thanks nVidia. :/
Annnnnd the GPU performs exactly the same as it did when nobody knew about this and it was cited as a stellar performance GPU at a good price point. That is just as true now as it was then. The power of suggestion…suddenly the GPU is flawed and runs like crap….right. That is a separate issue from Nvidia dropping the ball on reporting the correct specs, particularly the memory being bifurcated.
lied a again..
lied again..
False advertising is ILLEGAL.
Yah Yah, we all know Nvidia lied…What I find funny is all the AMD fan boys here trying to make a big deal out of it, even with only 3.5GB of usable memory the 970 still trades blows with AMD most powerful single GPU card and in some cases beats it and with less power and heat and less memory…heehee 😛
Better do something nVidia, you gonna get another court case
Nice nvidia… http://i.imgur.com/wsxR1Lx.gif
It’s deception, and being one of those dudes running 970 in SLI, and a 4k display, I can tell you it does run like crap once you go over 3.5GB’s. If something is advertised as 4GB’s on a 256 bit bus, you expect exactly that. Had it been advertised as 3.5GB on a 256 bit bus, with 512MB on a 32 bit bus I would have never even thought about buying it.
You can’t blame me, or anyone else for being upset that we were deceived, because that is in reality exactly what happened. The fact that Nvidia is now saying they knew all alone, and it is not a bug, but a feature doesn’t make anyone feel any better.
fuck u nvidia. what’s the point u guys release driver in future? nvidia god will punish u this motherfucker
because they can afford too, they are a practical high end monopoly.
Doesn’t matter, as a consumer you should be concerned AMD Fanboy or not, This is a company that you buy products from, I hope that doesn’t mean you’d let false advertising slide whether it’s Nvidia or Intel or even AMD, cause I definitely will not.
Fraud is Fraud which is unacceptable by any mean
If theyre lowering the price and i wont get that money back i wont ever get a nvidiacard even tho i was a fanboy…
Hitler reacts to the GTX 970 is live!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNGi06cq_pQ
AMD’s R9 200 series GPU’s came out over a WHOLE YEAR prior to GTX 900 series. Don’t think for a moment AMD cannot put foot to ass on nVidia’s Maxwell, efficiency or not.
*cough* R9 295×2 *cough*
just lol
it still would have been the best sub £300 card and if you bought a 4gb 970 as a solution to future 4 k gaming then more fool you anyway. Plenty of discussion RE 8GB performance for 4k prior to the 970 release.
Whilst nvidia fucked up nothing has changed and their stance is the correct one IMO.
I just find it hilarious how everyone owns a 4k monitor as of 3 days ago. yet a week ago they would have said they were over the moon with the performance/£ spent they were getting.
The people with issues have been having issues since day one which is why i don’t understand they didn’t come straight to us and this didn’t surface earlier.
upto resellers to do right by their disgruntled customers.
cough tesla cough
consumer market is nothing on the real business.
indeed
Oh noez Nvidia a big corporation didnt quite tell us the truth regarding their card, well looking at all the comments ” AMD ” Enthusiasts are out in force, what do you guys care, you don’t buy Nvidia, I’m happy with my Gtx 770 and will be upgrading in the future to Nvidia, I may pay more for an Nvidia card, but you get what you pay for, i’ve never had an issue with Nvidia, atleast they’ve come out with their hands up once they were caught out.
and this isn’t fraud.
So you think I don’t have a 4k display, and that means me being upset about being deceived is unfounded?
Your comment comes off as nothing but a corporate cheerleader being a corporate cheerleader. How the heck am I suppose to buy anything from a corporation that doesn’t advertise their products with the correct specifications?
EDIT: I funny how fast you decided to edit your comment.
I love this image right here. You all know the cure anyway, go AMD.
lalalal GTX 970 3.5 GB did to AMD
nice AMD :3
It’s almost as if anyone with a 1080 monitor could perhaps use more then 3.5GB’s with something like DSR. We all know this could never happen, so lets all just be huge fanboies, and disregard the fact that they are blatantly misrepresent their products, and continue to believe we are always getting what is advertised on the box/website, despite the fact that we haven’t in this particular case.
Even if you don’t own a 970, it is pretty objectionable to think that nVidia could get away with this. I am not really understanding why a consumer would be defending this type of action even if you are a fanboy. There is just no logic to it.
by edit you mean add to it
I have no problems with my 290 so don’t be mad
collect your tears in a bag you might need it to clean up the dribble
I have a 290 and a 285X so Fan boy I am not.
It is still the best card for £300 it still slaughters the 290 in many benchmarks
misled or not most people are unaffected by this it’s a lot of whining for the sake of whining. 🙂
ha! omfg! Sucked in not once, not twice but Thrice!
You just disregarded pretty much everything I wrote.
Most people that own a 970 can use DSR, which can easily use more then 3.5 GB’s, not only that…. it is the fact that apparently listed spec’s don’t have to be based in reality. Next thing we know 980Ti is released, and the spec sheet has a hundred million CUDA cores, and 16GB Vram on a 1024 bit memory bus.
Truth is, you don’t need to even own a gtx 970 to find this distasteful. You only need to be a consumer.
GiF of the Year 8)
I encourage anyone that finds the misrepresentation of the 970 objectionable to sign the change.org petition.
https://www.change.org/p/nvidia-refund-for-gtx-970
It’s really irritating to have bought a 970 and then look at these comments and see nvidia fanboys brag about sales figures, it’s people like that who allow businesses to get away with shit like this.
Yes, AMD lost potential revenue because nVidia lied to their customers. How does it feel to know that nVidia are not only lying to their customers, but destroying their competition as well?
If you think it’s great now, it’s going to be just magical if AMD goes bankrupt. I’m sure nVidia will treat everyone just fine as the sole designer of discrete GPUs on the market.
I just don’t understand why Nvidia or AMD fans actively want the other company to fail. It makes no sense. The competition drives prices down and keeps the companies moving forward. People are weird.
I couldn’t care less whether it’s AMD or Nvidia – and personally, I’ve been using Nvidia for a while due to the pricing cycle when I’ve been upgrading – we should *all* be calling this sort of shit out. They lied, and they covered up the lie, and now they’re lying again. Not only do we all need to vote with our wallets by returning the 970’s we’ve bought, but there definitely needs to be lawsuits to show them they can’t get away with this stuff.
Great. Isn’t it just fantastic that a company have put a competitor into financial trouble by lying to their customers? That’s just wonderful for everyone involved, right? That means we get a healthier market, right? That means we get better products, RIGHT?
You’re a fucking idiot.
In this case you don’t get more. In this case, you quite literally do not get what you paid for. Whether you’re happy with your 770 or not is completely irrelevant – unless you condone lying to customers and falsely advertising GPUs then you should be against this.
And amd still keeps rebranding their old graphics cards and sell them as new.
but but.. i really wish that adobe will support gtx 970 cuda’s.. still waiting for it.
Nobody still posted it? Disappointed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=spZJrsssPA0&x-yt-cl=85114404
Jesus Christ, just issue a 50 dollar refund and price drop, and I’ll be happy.
Nvidia – Pay more, for less.
This cracked me up! Thanks, as I really needed a good laugh at this point!!!
Sitting in my office here at work… As soon as I read this I hit Crtl, Alt, Del, Lock my workstation, stood up, put on my coat, went home, called Newegg and kindly got Refund RMA’s for both my SLI’d 970’s and dropped them off at UPS on the way back to work. My only regrets; (1) I bought one (NOT 2 this time) 980 so I still gave nGreedia my hard earned cash (as I refuse to go back to a Radeon), (2) All the time I wasted trying to get Games not to stutter (which is likely a different issue in-and-of itself, and I’ll probably have the same issue with the 980) AND I have to make up the hour here at work that it took me to return those Eeeeffffffin 970’s on an Friiiiiiday!!! EEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRR!!!
Tell me son
What Nvidia did is crappy without a doubt, but the reality of your argument is .5gb vram was not going to put you over the top on 4k.
Simple as this:
People have no brains
PS: We should have atleast 10 different GPU companies….
I’m glad you Nvidia Fanboy’s think like that, when you sue anyone for having sold you a 50miles/gallon car that in reality is a 50miles/gallon for the first 3 quarters of the deposit, and in the last 1 quarter is 12miles/gallon, REMEMBER they have internet too and can use your comment to get away with it, based on your own reasoning…Just a heads up lawyers do it nowadays…
Most people are to dumb to remember that…
they like to get fucked in the ass, we can’t do anything about it xD
There are advantages to having more than one but only a few companies in this industry. It’s much easier for devs, for one thing.
Oh and Nvidia never does that right? GTX 760 is little more than a refreshed 670. The 770 is a refreshed 680. Nvidia has quite the history of rebadging cards.
actually that was an employee who fucked up not nvidia as a whole. they know you cant change a hardware problem with software, or maybe a misiterpretation.
hmmm
and i ♥ this
ask for lube first
Except it doesn’t, so nVidia lied again. The 290x trades blows at 1080p and wipes the floor with the 970 in 4k. Good job promoting a company that would be completely happy to screw you over.
He is probably 13 and testosterone is running most parts of his brain. The lower brain of course, that upper on his head is already dead.
Here is the thing, I can play 4k @50-60fps on most newer games with SLI 970’s as long as I don’t go over 3.5GB’s. Which usually means I have to lower textures in most newer games to keep under(which is jokes really…. I have to keep under 3.5GB’s on my 4GB card lol?). As soon as you go over 3.5 the game turns into a slide show. So yeah VRAM is the biggest problem, if you don’t believe me like the other dude that is pretending to be an AMD user well being a hardcore corporate apologist for Nvidia, then cool, I really couldn’t care less. What I find most funny about this whole experience is people like you, and that other dude telling me how my rig runs on a 4k display. Raw power isn’t the problem, the problem is pretty apparent the moment you use more then 3.5GB’s….. but like yeah… tell me more about something you clearly have no clue about.
Except it doesn’t. Not even close. Fairly easy to push the card into situations that result in horrible frametimes that degrade overall playable levels of image quality. Not only filtering, but fairly critical aspects such as texture resolution. The 290 is still capable of playing at those settings with considerably more even frametimes.
Don’t be a clueless little ‘GTX’ child. Justifying your purchase is over, you got scammed again, just like 680 and titan owners.
wut
Yesit’s easier for devs, thats why they are getting evermore lazy when developing anything…just saying
It could perform even better that’s the point…
Well, just buy a 980 and you’re good to go. 970 is a useless card, even though sometimes it performs okay.
The R9 290x in bench marks is only about 10 fps slower in most games. And it tends to be more stable frame rates. (As in the min frames is around 25 or above 30) While I saw some benchmarks show the gtx980 dip a bit lower. Maybe driver issues. But it still is amazing how a last gen card can still trade blows with a current gen card.
Also remember the days of the 5870, it was a damn loud and hot card. Or the 4870 which was loud and hot. AMD never changed from the loud and hot. (okay maybe the 6000 was cooler but it was still loud.)
Ingame you wouldn’t notice the lower frames of the 290x. The days when I had my GTX580 and compared to the 6970 I can not tell the frame rate difference. Not sure why people are complaining about the frames.
“is not a bug, but rather a feature” zum wegschreien.nvidia ist witzig lol. funny company. thx
I cried, the video was only 2:36 but I cried with laughter for at least 3:00.
The bit about AMD’s wattage needs particularly got me because I’m only even looking at the Nvdia 970 because I have a 600w PSU and the damn R9’s need 750w min on their specs info.
Its a monopoly the costumer gives nvidia too blindly, that was the point he was trying to make.
High end monopoly is what intel has over AMD. This is not what’s going on in the GPU segment, and deep down, I think you know it too.
It performs as the benches said it would. Better, would make it a GTX 980.
Maybe people are being sold faulty gtx 980 chips intead of a planed all working solution…think abou that
That “employee” represents NVIDIA, so NVIDIA lied to us twice now.
They can mitigate it by keeping performance essential code in the 3.5GB area.
“KitGuru Says: Looks like the memory allocation issue of the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards is not a bug, but rather a feature.”
This sounds like bullsh*t of the highest degree! F*ck those guys…
Wouldn’t be anything new. Companies have been doing that for many years.
i’m saying goodbye to mine. i guess i’ll have to bite the bullet and go for the 980’s.
Is there a way to disable the slow 0.5 GB? I don’t want my graphics card to dip into the slow and unplayable region.
ok this is bullshit…I think we can sue for false advertising…advertising this card with 4gb but only uses 3.5 with no fix? letting us down NVidia…