Damn NVidia, they triple trolled me. First they say the card has high specs an reviewers show nice numbers for it, then people whine and show stuttering videos, NVidia follows up by saying the specs are lower, 500MB are crippled and that it is by design. And my card still doesn't bother to stutter @1440p running SOM and FC4 on Ultra using close to 3.9GB of the cards memory! Damn them, now they cheated me from being able to return the card too by removing it's ability to stutter.
Nvidia's drivers have a heuristics system that determines the least accessed memory and automatically maps that to the .5GB partition to reduce transmission over the lower bandwidth segment. This system is updated via drivers and can be/may already be improved on with recent ones. Regardless, Nvidia should have been upfront about the partition and it's potential to impact performance. I don't think Nvidia lied maliciously, **** happens all the time in corporate environments, but I do think PR responses like this blog post are the wrong way to handle it. He could have simply said "We had a miscommunication, this is what went wrong, this is how we are fixing it, we are really sorry and appreciate our fans that are sticking with us" Obviously with better grammar and whatnot but yeah. He's basically saying the card could have been worse, no one wants to hear that right now. So again, water under the bridge, let it go, fix the problem -- settle with customers, don't let it happen again.
It's not just the memory that's been worse.The whole damn card got downgraded in secret.They advertised 64 ROP's while it had 56.The memory was advertised as 2 mb's but downgraded to 1.50 mb's.Some other's say 1.75 mb's.Anyway.Did they downgraded that?Yes.Does it make a difference in performance?Probably no, but the moral thing was that they LIED.Then the bandwith.They said 224 GB's but was 192 in the end. You see, it's not just the vram.The whole card got messed up and they managed to sell it for way more money than it ever deserved.How the F did they ''miscommunicated'' with the publisher team at this point, i don't know.
:infinity: Nvidia fanboy detected. A company as important and big as Nvidia can't communicate internally? Yeah, I'll stick with AMD.
So if you stick with AMD,what are you doing here in the first place? Either way nVidia messed up and they need to be punished.
Hahaha, so they send a trixer that adds another GB to my card? I guess at least you did understand the sarcasm of my post. I have seen a lot of people writing about their stuttering issues, tried to replicate them myself by asking for their settings etc., but this cards just eats it raw, no stuttering. I'm happy for that it works here, but it still bothers me that there seem to be a lot of people who had/have issues with their 970. Either there is a QA issue at hand on top of the new design or a lot of people got crappy setups, I dunno anymore.
He's a founder of nvidia how would he get replaced? Also lol at some fanboy comments, they're still defending his stupid public response, a feature extra 1gb vram, segmented in crippled 512mb,.. Right. Imho They fkced up 970 really bad, Im now only updating to full high-end chips not these x04 in between, I started with Fermi and plan to stick with this route if I upgrade to next nv chip, also for less driver issues.
Uh, I had a GTX 560. Uh, I'm a PC gamer. Uh, I want the PC community to prosper. Uh, all actual VGs run AMD hardware then what happens when they are ported to PC and lose all their AMD optimizations because... . Uh, you know about free speech. Uh, :infinity:.
Look, when Hilbert posted a review for a GTX970 I actually posted in my Facebook that Nvidia had just released the greatest video card ever. Great.
A lot of people use "tweaks" that introduce problems, because they're convinced that those "tweaks" improve stability and performance. Most aren't smart enough to figure out that their "tweaks" are what's causing the problems.
Seems like I'm one of the only people here who isn't outraged over this. Yes, nvidia's marketing team screwed up. But the GTX 970 is still a very good GPU, and it still technically has 4GB, even if 0.5 of it isn't directly accessible. I haven't bought a high-end nvidia GPU in 9 years but even I think they still make very good products. I don't fully understand why its so difficult to make the 970 access the last 512MB, but as long as it still has a function and doesn't hinder gameplay (which from what I heard, games play fine) then what difference does it make? If it's just the principle then that's a really stupid reason to want to return a GPU and suddenly hate nvidia. If you bought a 970 because it performed well in benchmarks, you really have no right to demand a refund; the GPU is still performing as you expected it would. If you bought it because you're an nvidia fanboy, well, you're an idiot. If you bought it and are pissed that nvidia's marketing lied, that's fair.
My only issue is the fact that NVidia lied. My card performance as Hilbert's review indicated so I'm happy with the card itself.
I agree with GhostXL on this matter. From what i´ve read in several sites about this, in the past, Nvidia had no other choice than to cut the maximum amount of memory available from a cut down card like a 970 because of some fused off parts and in this case they would have released the 970 with 3GB. But with Kepler they found out a way around this and managed to fit another extra GB of memory, although half of it runs slower. So from a technical point of view, this seems a good solution to add more memory, at least to me. The problem was the fact they advertised the card with the wrong specs and only admitted this when people started reporting strange memory patterns. Even worse they did nothing to remedy the situation of unhappy onwers who really wanted/needed the card to have the full 4GB of memory. So for me, there´s nothing wrong with card and the solution they found to add more memory but Nvidia´s attitude towards their customers was really ****ty!!! I hope everything in my post makes sense.
