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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.