Happens all the time. You can find the same behavior when the discussion is FX, APU, 970, Pentium, ARM, Broadwell, AMD, Nvidia, etc... don't you agree?
I am guilty of posting and having an opinion on things that don't directly effect me. But that's not really what I am mean. Everyone should have an opinion and are entitled to speak of it. But I am talking about these same people who to on and on about it, posting in thread after thread, post after post, throwing up charts and their interpretations of them to no end.
These people that have no stake it the matter but want to make the biggest stink. The worse part is that there might be some people who are really upset with all this. They are lost in the middle of the mud slinging.
I just want to say first hand, the hassle of returning your GPU may not be worth it. I was able to pull out the 970 and install the 980 the very same day. My downtime was a few hours tops. An inconvenience, sure. But I learned something out of all this. Those few extra fps on the charts that the 980 has over the 970, it amounts to a small real world difference. So this means that all these gpus, from the 290(x),970, to 980......they all perform really really similar. 10-15% is as small of a difference as it seems.
Of course there are people out there who want to make a move out of pure principle, just to satisfy their frustration with nvidia. They may want to move to AMD straight away out of spite. I totally support that. Sure there are those people like me, who are not strapped for cash and just want a card with the specs they thought they bought. These are not the people that my msg is to. Do what you want to do. That's how I alway feel.
I just want to let those unsure that just be mindful. Through all that effort, the only options right now basically ending up with a side grade. If you just want to return the card out of principle, I fully support that decision. That's why I returned mine. But now I have a unique perspective that I think is worth sharing. There are those that have no other cards to play on when they send off their 970, they may be unsure what they should do. This is why I am sharing my experience.
When I see that Jon peddle reports less than 5% returned their 970s, I totally understand why. Most people who pull their cards out, have nothing to put back in their PC. Most people that are using their 970s, aren't pushing their cards to the very limit just to watch it stutter and complain about it. Surely the ones that think they have been duped are upset and angry. They have every darn right to be. But as a person who went from the 979 to the 980, I found these ultra high settings and over 2x DSR to be too demanding in general. That the 970 stutters, but the 980 struggles at these settings too. That is very very important to realize.
I now know for sure that the 980 isn't even powerful enough for the settings I want to play. It's these new games and new features like DSR, they take a lot of horsepower. It is just unrealistic with even my 980. And this is the case. There are sites trying to exploit the memory issue and pushing these cards to the extreme edge. And just about everyone that test with other cards show clearly that even the 980 struggles with those settings too. Even if it is not as bad, its still not pleasant. Surely people know this: anything causing the 980 to struggle will cause the 970 to struggle that much worse. The 980 is on paper, at least 25% more powerful than a 970. But in the real world, they usually perform 10-15% apart. But the fact is, the 980 has 123% more cuda cores and a higher clock speed. That's undeniable.
The 970 is still a great performer and a lot of the time the 980 is only 10-12% faster while having 125% the specs. This is the real world. This is why going thru all the hassle of return/refund may not be worth it to many people. Because there just isn't that much better right now.
I support anyone sending their cards back but I also want people to know what I found out. Anything that caused my 970 to be unplayable, those settings aren't practical on the 980 either. For 95% of people out there, this is exactly the case.
People upset with being misled, you might be better off voting with your wallet when cards that are a real upgrade come out. Cards like the 390(x) or whatever it may be called.