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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.
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).
...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.
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.
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.
nvidia did much more egregious deceptive marketing well over a decade ago in the GeForce4 MX, which didn't have programmable shaders like the GeForce3 series. 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. That misleading advertising actually did real financial damage, at least in my company's case, both in lost productivity and in replacing the hardware.
That really bothered me, and I started buying ATI cards for a time after that, since I didn't want to reward a company for underhanded behavior. I only started buying nvidia again quite a few years after that since the ATI drivers were giving me more trouble than they were worth.
This is not quite as bad, but it definitely smells a bit the same. A "mistake", really? I'm betting they wouldn't have made a "mistake" in underestimating their card's performance. Marketing at it's finest.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.