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Nvidia Faces Suit Over GTX970 Performance Claims
According to this story at PC World, Nvidia was hit with a class action lawsuit Thursday that claims it misled customers about the capabilities of the GTX 970, which was released in September.
Nvidia markets the chip as having 4GB of performance-boosting video RAM, but some users have complained the chip falters after using 3.5GB of that allocation.
The lawsuit says the remaining half gigabyte runs 80 percent slower than it's supposed to. That can cause images to stutter on a high resolution screen and some games to perform poorly, the suit says.
It was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California and names as defendants Nvidia and Giga-Byte Technology, which sells the GTX 970 in graphics cards.
Nvidia declined to comment on the lawsuit Friday and Giga-Byte couldn't immediately be reached.
This doesn't look very different from when Seagate was taken to court over mislabeling hard-drives sizes, using 1000000 bytes for a MB instead of the commonly used 1048576 bytes for a MB.
I fully expect they will lose this, lose some PR metric, and start to implement the age old skill of asterisks on packages and adverts.
What does that mean? It runs at 20% of the speed of the other 3.5GB?
If it said, "the remaining half gigabyte runs at 80 percent of the speed it's supposed to" that would make perfect sense, but "80% slower" is very confusing and its meaning is open to interpretation.
Memory performance between the two segments (3.5 + 0.5 GB) of memory works in an XOR manner so that accessing the slow segment prevents access to the 3.5 GB segment. Also, the whole memory access issue is a distraction from the fact that Nvidia originally advertised that the 970 had 64 ROPs (when it really has 56) and that it has 2 MB of L2 cache (when it really has 1.75 MB).
First World Problems.
I think they will find it real difficult to prove that Nvidia was intentionally (Ntentionally?) misleading people with the advertisements. Nvidia's response and explanation for what happened seemed pretty detailed and made sense to me. These kind of lawsuits actually piss me off a little anyway, because the lawyers are the only ones who really benefit. Even if Nvidia is made to compensate people who purchased the card, it's unlikely going to amount to any more than a few dollars for each person. Except the lawyers, who will get their huge fees regardless.
Do the people who file these things actually think they are somehow taking the company to task or making the world a better place? They certainly can't be doing it for actual money or greed.
When the firm representing the class bills up a few million, the defendant agrees to paying the fees and to mail all class members a $5 discount coupon or some useless download.
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...and I say that as an owner of 2x970s. Every benchmark you see is as advertised. It actually has 4GB of RAM that can be reached at the advertised speed, just not all 4GB of it simultaneously. Nobody's come up with a "smoking gun" benchmark where framerates tank for gaming. The 780 Ti with 3GB RAM beats it in pretty much benchmarks - even at 3840x2160 in SLI - so it seems that the last 512MB don't make much of a difference at all, at least not in today's games. They'd better find some compelling examples of actual harm, because I still haven't seen it. I might be biased though, since I'm kinda hoping there won't be.
What is certain though is that nVidia screwed up big, because this really would have been a footnote if they'd just informed about it. It would have been known as a 4GB card that's really 3.5GB-ish. When I bought it I thought it had the same memory subsystem as the GTX980, like two GTX970 in SLI with 2x13 = 26/16ths the shaders will always perform better. Now that might not be true in a 3.5-4GB scenario but it's a maybe kinda thing. I've long since learned that you buy computers for what you want today, tomorrow.... maybe something entirely new comes around and you want to replace it anyway. Not that I see these two being out of date for a while, seriously kicking ass at 2x145W GPU + 88W CPU it's ~500W ass-kicking system.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It is just a bunch of whiny asshats who care about specs on paper rather than real world performance. The 970 is damn amazing. It makes the 980 nothing more than a overpriced luxury toy, and I say that as a 980 owner. Its performance is within 10-15% of a 980s and it is like half the price, what's not to like?
Also as for the memory thing this is actually a BONUS from nVidia, not a cripple. What I mean is in the past, they'd have just stuck 3.5GB on it and called it good. Then, if something needed more than 3.5GB, you go to system memory which is very slow 16GB/sec if you are running 16x PCIe 3 and much slower if you run less (like if you are doing SLI on a consumer board with PCIe 2 it would be 4GB/sec). However with this, you get another 512MB of RAM that is faster. Not as fast as the primary RAM, but much faster than hitting the system RAM over the PCIe bus. It won't perform as well as a 980 in those high memory situations, but it would perform better than if it just didn't have it at all.
I agree they should have noted it better, but really who gives a shit in reality? The 970 is the best "step down" card they've ever made compared to the highest end. Amazing value for the money and real world benchmarks from somewhere like HardOCP show it kills at modern games.
It's also funny how they act like nVidia did this to "harm" people for some business reason. If anything, they'd want to make the 970 look worse so people would be more likely to spend the near double to get a 980. However instead they made the 970 as close to the 980 as they could and I'm sure that ate in to the 980 market.
there's a whole industry devoted to suing "deep pockets". I once attended a presentation on this that explained to lawyers which companies they should target, how long they have to wait until they should gather plaintiffs for a class action law suit and how lucrative this is. There are even people financing these suits as an investment. I'm still not sure what is more unethical, lawyers leeching off of companies or companies lying to customers.
I don't see the problem if there is one (yet?)?
This card is the smaller form factor one meant for mITX platforms (stuffed in hadron hydro case), supposedly it is a tad bit slower and not the greatest for over clocking (which i have done none of). I could water cool it and change that, but I haven't.
I haven't used all of the memory yet. When I open 3x Eve game clients (the norm if ever) I'm only tapping a little under 2gb. I haven't checked all games but I have checked a few and most of the games I do play even in the highest detail don't use but half of the video memory (gpuz).
Now that said if Giga-byte wants to offer a juicy deal to GTX 970 owners to shut this guy up, I can guarantee my next purchase will be another giga-byte product (and I'm a regular!)!
'nuff said.
Where's my noprize?
No. The reason it affects the 970 is because it's missing some of the hardware that's in the 980.
Also, 3d Tech News and Pixel Hacking reported that the 970 doesn't have this issue when running games in OpenGL mode.
http://www.geeks3d.com/20150127/opengl-apps-not-impacted-by-gtx-970-vram-limitations/
970 is only effected cause a shader core and ROP are disabled cause they are bad. the last 512mb ram shares a cluster so its slower cause that. Reviewers have test this and only time it became a problem is running super high rez with MSAA and scaling, pretty much to point probably running sub 40fps anyway.
I can't wait for my postcard-check in the mail for $0.21 explaining how the lawfirm got $34,500,000 of the $35,000,000 settlement and the remaining $500,000 gets divided among all GTX970 owners.
Just as the article describes, while playing Battlefield 4 I'll have these sudden moments of graphics lag. It happens quite often.
I'm suing Atari, because when I needed help I pressed the HELP key on my 800XL, but help never came.
It does matter for CUDA and Opencl performance. So even though games might work around it (except on the mentioned high resolutions), it simply runs into problems if you are going to use it for computing on >3.5GB.
SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You were wrong!
Where to start?
Given your love for calling people idiots, I'll start here:
"I owned a GF4MX because it was a fantastic value. As a budget gamer, it was the best buy at the time if you weren't playing games which demanded shaders."
Nope... the GF4MX was a terrible value, considerably worse than the Geforce 3, and worse than a comparable card from ati. The fact that you thought it was a good value is just a greater indication of nvidia's spin campaign at the time. The real value at the time was the GF3 Ti200 which could typically be overclocked to Ti500 levels, or just short thereof.
Let's also not forget the considerable lack of honesty in marketing a product as the Geforce4 when it was in fact slower, and older than the Geforce 3. This was the first point that a computer industry company employed this practice to my knowledge (sadly it's rather commonplace now). To compare with your truck analogy it would be like Ford bringing an "F450" to market which actually has a lower towing capacity than the F350 (note, I realize that Ford already has an F450, but the analogy still stands).