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.

Comments

Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Seagate

[TapeCutter]

Looks exactly the same to me, people wanting compensation for their idiotic complaint. Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia? Is it really disgruntled customers or is it a competitor playing a dirty PR game?

Re:Seagate

[0123456]

Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia?

Lawyers?

They'll make a few million, and all the GTX970 owners will get a $5 discount coupon off their next Nvidia card.

Re:Seagate

[LostMyBeaver]

I was thinking that the $5 discount coupon would only be given to people willing to spend 15 minutes filling out the forms to get it. The lawyers will collect the difference after the expiration.

I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.

There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"

Re:Seagate

[hairyfeet]

Good lord, what is with all the corporate ass kissing? Nvidia is gonna need extra wipes tonight to clean all the lip prints off their behinds!

Look, for those that seem to have trouble understanding the concept of truth in advertising I'll spell it out, okay? They ADVERTISED a 4GB card but if you try to load a HD texture pack that goes over 3.5GB does it work? NO IT DOES NOT because the last 512Mb might as well be turbocache system RAM for all the good it will do ya! So it is really REALLY simple, they gimped the chip, the way they gimped the chip made it for all intents and purposes a 3.5GB card (since you will NEVER EVER EVER BE ABLE TO USE THE LAST 512MB because of how big of a speed difference there is, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to use a large HD texture with the last 512MB running at just 20% speed, so its worthless) and yet they sold it as a 4GB card.

The solution is obvious, anybody who bought the 4GB should be refunded the difference between a 3GB version of the card and a 4GB and all future cards should be sold as 3.5GB since that last 512MB will never be used by a single game EVAR as it'll tie such a fucking boat anchor to performance you might as well be running it on a 9800GT. If they would have sold it as a 3.5GB card? No problem, case closed. But people shelled out for these specifically so they could load all those HD texture packs which just aren't gonna run on these, you will have to treat it as a 3GB card because if you go 1MB into that last 512MB? Say goodbye to your framerate. I'm sorry but I agree with the plaintiffs, they didn't get what they paid for.

Re:Seagate

[drinkypoo]

nvidia did much more egregious deceptive marketing well over a decade ago in the GeForce4 MX,

Really? I had one of those cards, what was wrong with it?

I actually learned about it because the company where I worked was fooled into buying one of these for my computer, when the program I was using required one of the higher-spec devices.

Fooled? How?

That misleading advertising actually did real financial damage,

No. The idiot chump who made the purchasing decision and bought the card even though it did not have programmable shaders and didn't say it had programmable shaders is the one who did the company real financial damage. The GF4MX never claimed to have programmable shaders. Are you that idiot? Or did the GF4MX just touch you somewhere? Can you show us on this picture of the internet where nVidia touched you?

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. As a corporate user who needed shader support, you'd have to be an asshole to buy the GF4MX anyway, because it was a budget card. You wouldn't buy a card like that to do work, unless you just needed a basic GPU.

This may shock you, but you are going to have to do your homework no matter what you buy. The model numbers on cars are equally worthless. Let me guess, your business also bought a one ton truck and discovered after ignoring the weight allowances that it couldn't actually haul one ton in the bed legally, and therefore Ford stole your money and kicked you in the nuts because you were too dumb to read and understand the specs, and that the GVWR would only allow you 3/4 of a ton of actual hauling capacity in your one ton truck.

It's worse than just 0.5 GB of slow memory

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

This will be settled

[fred911]

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.

 

Re:probably won't go anywhere

[0123456]

I don't get your problem with the people suing. They were promised X for Y dollars. They only got a fraction of X.

They were promised 4GB. They got 4GB. Complaining that 0.5GB of that runs slow is like complaining that 2GB of the 6GB in my laptop runs at half the speed of the other 4GB.

The only valid complaint they have is that Nvidia said it had 64 ROPs when it only has 56. That's not really something worth a lawsuit, when, as I understand it, the chip isn't capable of generating pixels fast enough to make use of 64.

As I said above, the only people who will really benefit from this are lawyers.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of businesses cheating customers is a first world problem?

Or is that shit okay elsewhere?

SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer

[Roman Mamedov]

SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:probably won't go anywhere

[drinkypoo]

For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed.

No, no it isn't, and it hasn't been since the Amiga.

There is no PC where it is common to have different speeds of memory.