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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.
80% slower = 20% of the speed = 5 times slower (takes 5 times as long to do something) = 500% slower.
OR
80% slower = takes 80% longer to do something = 1/1.8 times slower = 0.55555555555 times slower = 44% slower.
See, ambiguous. There are 2 well defined definitions of 80% slower: gets 80% less done per unit time, OR takes 80% longer to get the same thing done. They have very different meanings. For one of them, 100% slower = gets nothing done ever, and the other means it takes takes twice as long (you have to wait an extra 100% of the original time). The same applies to 100% faster: one version means infinatly fast, and the other means twice as fast.
They were also promised a specific performance at the same time as the 4GB of memory. They aren't getting it. At the least, Nvidia should have offered a driver that avoids the last half Gig of ram and a partial refund.
This isn't a car where it is well understood that top speed and maximum fuel efficiency don't happen at the same time. This is an unusual situation for a graphics card that substantially degrades it's performance, and so, it's value.
More accurately, nVidia could probably make it clear that 3.5 gigs is better than 3 gigs and 512megs is more expensive to add than the extra gig. So, a 4 gig card with 3.5 gigs active is the best you can expect right now. So the user with the 4 gig card can still expect better performance than a user with a 3 gig card.
Pretty sad
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.
That is just silly. Nvidia benefit by making the product look better to highend gamers so they don't choose the competitions card. You act like Nvidia is the only maker of highend gaming cards. It is actually worse than a 3.5GB card as at least with 3.5GB gamers and drivers by default understand they are going to have a performance impact if beyond that is accessed and hence will only use it when necessary, with 500MB of slow memory by default the games had no understanding they would be crippling game performance by accessing that part of the memory. The 970 is a nice card, but Nvidia did blatantly mislead purchasers and while the issue won't even impact more than 90% of owners it is still an issue and one that could have been avoided by Nvidia being honest.