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NVIDIA GTX 970 Specifications Corrected, Memory Pools Explained
Vigile writes Over the weekend NVIDIA sent out its first official response to the claims of hampered performance on the GTX 970 and a potential lack of access to 1/8th of the on-board memory. Today NVIDIA has clarified the situation again, this time with some important changes to the specifications of the GPU. First, the ROP count and L2 cache capacity of the GTX 970 were incorrectly reported at launch (last September). The GTX 970 has 52 ROPs and 1792 KB of L2 cache compared to the GTX 980 that has 64 ROPs and 2048 KB of L2 cache; previously both GPUs claimed to have identical specs. Because of this change, one of the 32-bit memory channels is accessed differently, forcing NVIDIA to create 3.5GB and 0.5GB pools of memory to improve overall performance for the majority of use cases. The smaller, 500MB pool operates at 1/7th the speed of the 3.5GB pool and thus will lower total graphics system performance by 4-6% when added into the memory system. That occurs when games request MORE than 3.5GB of memory allocation though, which happens only in extreme cases and combinations of resolution and anti-aliasing. Still, the jury is out on whether NVIDIA has answered enough questions to temper the fire from consumers.
Right, right?
Ah you can't tell, but I'm not able to hold a straight face.
You pay for an airdrop containing the extra ROPS and Cache. It's contested, though, so you may or may not get it.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
How about giving us the option to either always be able to run at maximum speed (disable that last 0.5GiB) or always let the software use the full 4GiB (at the cost of speed if more than 3.5GiB is required).
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What about those users (more than one, anecdotes are data not anomalies!) whose use causes the GPUs to attempt to address more than 3.5GB VRAM causing them to crash out? If what NVidia are claiming here according to TFS is accurate, then this should not be happening. It is happening, the 3.5GB roof is being hit hard and people are feeling it. What say you, NVidia?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Consumers are fine. The only benchmark that matters to a normal consumer is "How fast does it run my games?" and the answer for the 970 is "Extremely damn fast." It offers performance quite near the 980, for most games so fast that your monitor's refresh rate is the limit, and does so at half the cost. It is an extremely good buy, and I say this as someone who bought a 980 (because I always want the highest end toy).
Some people on forums are trying to make hay about this because they like to whine, but if you STFU and load up a game the thing is just great. While I agree companies need to keep their specs correct, the idea that this is some massive consumer issue is silly. The spec heads on forums are being outraged because they like to do that, regular consumers are playing their games happily, amazed at how much power $340 gets you these days.
Doesn't this imply that the 500 megabytes of RAM is faster? by a factor of 7?
As usual, AnandTech's article is generally the best technical reporting on the matter
Key takeaways (aka tl;dr version):
* Nvidia's initial announcement of the specs was wrong, but only because the technical marketing team wasn't notified that you could partially disable a ROP unit with the new architecture. They overstated the number of ROPs by 8 (was 64, actually 56) and the amount of L2 cache by 256KB (was 2MB, actually 1.75MB). This was quite unlikely to be a deliberate deception, and was most likely an honest mistake.
* The card effectively has two performance cliffs for exceeding memory usage. Go over 3.5GB, and it drops from 196GB/s to 28GB/s; go over 4GB and it drops from 28GB/s to 16GB/s as it goes out to main memory. This makes it act more like a 3.5GB card in many ways, but the performance penalty isn't quite as steep, and it intelligently prioritizes which data to put in the slower segment.
* The segmented memory is not new; Nvidia previously used it with the 660 and 660 Ti, although for a different reason.
* Because, even with the reduced bandwidth, the card is bottlenecked elsewhere, this is unlikely to cause actual performance issues in real-world cases. The only things that currently show it are artificial benchmarks that specifically test memory bandwidth, and most of those were written specifically to test this card.
* As always, the only numbers that matter for buying a video card are benchmarks and prices. I'm a bigger specs nerd than most, but even I recognize that the thing that matters is application performance, not theoretical. And the application performance is good enough for the price that I'd still buy one, if I were in the market for a high-end but not top-end card.
Not a shill or fanboy for Nvidia - I use and recommend both companies' cards, depending on the situation.
How far did Nvidia push their performance #s into the public eye before this debacle? Will owners be due a replacement card that preforms up to what was promised or perhaps even a refund?
A particular high performance car has a premium 8 cylinder engine and 32 valves at 400 hp. They also sell a non-premium version which is also 8 cylinders but only 30 valves and makes 350 hp but is a lot cheaper. The difference is that one cylinder is missing two valves which lowers its maximum power compared to the premium version. The engine's computer correctly controls the engine to compensate for the one weird cylinder, but someone in the marketing department sold the car as having 32 valves when it only had 30. The 350 hp figure is accurate, but some people complain because if they reprogram the engine control chip to force the one 2-valve cylinder to run at the same conditions as the other 4-valve cylinders, the car only makes 300 hp. But in all normal circumstances the car performs as advertised, only it was initially sold with incorrect details as to how the engine was put together to make it nearly as fast for much cheaper than the premium version.
If consumers end up getting anything, at best it'll probably be an old game download 3 years from now. Those kinds of lawsuits or corporate "apologies" never seem to be worth it, and yet an old game is still far better than most of them, just look at Sony's "apologies" to it's users.
I just bought a GTX970 and I'm chuffed with it, 89% of the performance of a GTX980 for 60% of the price, I couldn't justify spending the thick end of five hundred quid for a graphics card and the GTX970 will run pretty much anything I throw at it.
Captcha : illusion
NVidia has only one option out of this hole, they need to give a full refund when one returns the card. This is just false advertising and I can truely say, that I will never buy a NVidia, thanks to this and the previous case with defective GPUs which plagued laptops. Two of my friends have met those defective NVidia GPUs, when their a 2-3 year old laptops suddenly lose a GPU, and on both cases the vendor (HP and Acer) has refused to give any compensation.
I thought about shelling out the dough for the 980s, but didn't, because, well - same CPU, lower clock, right?
Wrong.
Less than happy about this.
..don't panic
The reason you don't go out and buy the latest AAA title is because, in recent years, they haven't been living up to the hype. Buggy, unfinished, and not quite the product that is expected. ( You know . . . . playable. )
:|
Wondering if we have to start doing the same thing with hardware now. Let the same folks who pre-order game titles beta-test this stuff for a few months to determine if the marketing claims are legitimate or not, then decide on if you should buy it.
" Just ship the damn thing ! We'll update the drivers later. "
sounds like plenty. I have observed some 3D graphics programs can use 3.5 Gigabytes of random access memory as well. Take for example Poser and Octane Render. Octane loads the entire scene (geometry and textures, I think) into the onboard VRAM. All of the games that I play hardly use 700 MB on my old Nvidia Geforce card with 1 GB of 128 bit memory. I could barely fit a simple 3D scene with a high quality figure and clothes into 1 GB of VRAM.
I paid for a card with 4GB of ram at 1150Mhz. 0.5GB of that ram is at 1150/7 MHz. Clearly they have lied about their specs and have defrauded millions of people.
Shouldn't the driver be responsible for making sure that "slower" data ends up in that half gig? Something besides the frame buffer or textures. I bet that better memory management could completely hide the problem.