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NVIDIA Responds To GTX 970 Memory Bug
Vigile writes Over the past week or so, owners of the GeForce GTX 970 have found several instances where the GPU was unable or unwilling to address memory capacities over 3.5GB despite having 4GB of on-board frame buffer. Specific benchmarks were written to demonstrate the issue and users even found ways to configure games to utilize more than 3.5GB of memory using DSR and high levels of MSAA. While the GTX 980 can access 4GB of its memory, the GTX 970 appeared to be less likely to do so and would see a dramatic performance hit when it did. NVIDIA responded today saying that the GTX 970 has "fewer crossbar resources to the memory system" as a result of disabled groups of cores called SMMs. NVIDIA states that "to optimally manage memory traffic in this configuration, we segment graphics memory into a 3.5GB section and a 0.5GB section" and that the GPU has "higher priority" to the larger pool. The question that remains is should this affect gamers' view of the GTX 970? If performance metrics already take the different memory configuration into account, then I don't see the GTX 970 declining in popularity.
I'm just going to come out and say that to advertise the card with 4GB, but then disable any amount of it, is false advertising. Sure, most games can't actually hit 4GB since most games are still brain-dead 32-bit applications that can't access more than 4GB of any memory.
But this is a sign of things to come. Where the next generation sub-20nm GPU's will be advertised with RAM amounts and supposed to have 2-3X the processing power, but part of the GPU will be competely unusable because the operating system or software being used isn't 64-bit aware.
It isn't a but. It's a lie.
These cards are advertised and sold as having 4gb of DDR5, but actually only have 3.5gb and then 0.5gb of slower stuff. When you are buying high end cards to pump a lot of pixels, all of this is consumed, meaning you will hit unnecessary performance limitations. Especially when moving to an SLI setup.
This is shady bullshit. This isn't a case of "You screwed me out of one percent and I'm going to whine about it". This is the case of people spending a thousand bucks for a certain level of performance and compatibility that they have come to expect form the product and, instead, finding themselves penalized for being power users.
Tell us where they lied - the card has 4GB of memory in one bank, its logically separated out internally when used by the cards processor. But it still has 4GB of memory.
Looks to me like the marketing department at nVidia is running the show.
An engineer would never hide this distinction.
I'd be unhappy if I found out my 980 had this flaw. Can't blame the consumer at all.
Sorry guys... complain away you deserve it.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Thing thing is if you go and look at benchmarks of the cards in actual games, you find out the 970 wrecks shit, particularly given its price point. The 980 is an overpriced luxury (I say this as a 980 owner) because the 970 gets nearly the same performance for like half the price. The difference with its memory controller just doesn't seem to matter in actual games out there on the market.
And that's the real thing here the the spec head forget: You buy these to run actual software. If it does well on all actual software, then who gives a shit about the details?
I dont know? I remember all kinds of things.
I DO have a large collection of old retro DOS games, some of which are still quite fun to play, but which dont run worth SHIT on WINE or modern windows. (and cruising inside dosbox just doesn't feel the same. MoSlo and real hardware feel like the genuine experience.)
My inability to forget legacy shit sometimes pays off, when I come in contact with a poor IT wage slave who has to maintain legacy CNC equipment. (Sometimes phone equipment too, but mostly CNC equipment) Things like 2D vinyl cutters, old PCB milling/masking machines, etc. Those things cost millions of dollars when new, and despite being ancient beyond words inside by modern standards, the owners rarely consider "buying a new one" an acceptable solution, as long as said expensive legacy devices can be coaxed into continuing to make product. Typically, these devices simply cannot be upgraded to a more modern OS, for multitudinous reasons. The most commonplace one is that there simply arent any drivers for the custom PCI (or even ISA!) cards inside them, and the drivers that do exist require realmode level control over the hardware to work (Or the control software is so poorly written that it can't work on anything newer, etc.).
Sometime last year, the topic of how to reduce the need for re-imaging win9X installations came up here on slashdot. (I forget the story.. does not matter) A poster was in the undesirable position of having to maintain such a legacy device, and my inability to forget legacy shit paid off for him. I told him that he could basically make his legacy devices damned near maintenance free by using syslinux as the bootloader with an ext2 partition holding a small (512mb or so) disk image, and using memdisk. System acts goofy? Just reboot it. Fresh, clean image each and every time. Because the actual HDD is formatted with an EXT flavor OS, the win9x running does not see it or use it for anything. The actual HDD never gets written to. Switching out an aging IDE disk with a CF->IDE adapter, this works out just fine. The flash is never written to, just read from, even when windows is running.
He was having problems where he would have to re-image his CF cards every few months because of how intrinsically shitty and unstable win9x was. He was VERY interested in running win9x from a ramdisk. I never heard back, but I hope it worked out for him.
As for why I can't seem to ever forget? Who knows. I'm just unlucky maybe?
I can shit out a config.sys and autoexec.bat right from the dos prompt, straight from memory even to this day.