Nvidia Hit with False Advertising Suit over GTX 970 Performance

[2is]

Ever consider that the 970 is a defective GPU based on the 980?

So something has to be broken on it to be a 970.

You guys must have thought you were buying a 980 rebadged up just to save you money!

How does any of that guess work change the fact the 970 isn't what it was advertised to be? It's not simply misleading. It's a blatant lie. Being American has nothing to do with it. You don't have to be American to see that. You just need to know how to read.

 

[Spanners]

Wow, that Jen-Hsun post is just... awful.
Apparently we're all at fault for not seeing the genius of Nvidia for engineering the 970 like that. Shame on us.
That seals it, I'm not buying anything from those frauds for a looong time.

Yeah, he seems to feel slighted that people were annoyed and not excited!

 

[guskline]

I bought the 970 because of the 4Gb advertised. I came from 2- 670's in sli with 2Gb memory. I would not have purchased the 970 and instead went with a 290x or waited for a different card had I known.

I see I'm not alone! Welcome to the 2% club!:thumbsup:

 

[jackstar7]

Caveat Emptor is it lol

People who read reviews on tech sites in order to be properly informed are being wary of their buying.

 

[Enigmoid]

LOL... again, you're caught plain lying and obfuscating facts. AMD launched cards at a certain speed, and reviews tested it at that. People who bought it, bought it based on those specifications and reviews. In case of Nvidia, they advertised certain specifications, and turns out that the actual specifications are indeed lower than advertised. Those two are quite different situations, and it seems you clearly want to muddy waters than have an honest discussion on a thread.

And reviews showed Crossfire working fine...until oh wait.

I find it hard to believe AMD had no idea crossfire wasn't working until it was brought up.

This kind of thing happens all the time.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

That blog post doesn't even talk about the ROPs or the L2 cache. Classic Nvidia.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I've read all the Nvidia bullet points 100 times before there is no need to repeat them again. BTW I don't see why bragging that the card has the same performance as before is a positive, that same performance is how people found out there was a hardware issue in the first place.

And that same performance is why they bought the card. I am sure nobody just looked at the specs and said, ahhh, 4gb of vram, I want that card. The performance today "is what it is", as they say. That was pretty well known. I dont think the performance per say is really relevant to the suit one way or the other.

The problem I see with the mis-stated specs is that one could overestimate performance on unreleased games, but that is a very hard thing to quantify.

 

[iiiankiii]

GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment

Wow, that should be the reason you should avoid this card if you plan to keep your card for a longer period of time. The moment Nvidia stops "optimizing" for the GTX 970, you'll see some huge drop in performance. Since Nvidia is actively trying to a keep that slow 512MB from being access, games that are not "optimized" through their driver will suffer greatly.

Let's hope there's a way to prevent access of that 512MB across all games.

 

[Vesku]

Wow, that should be the reason you should avoid this card if you plan to keep your card for a longer period of time. The moment Nvidia stops "optimizing" for the GTX 970, you'll see some huge drop in performance. Since Nvidia is actively trying to a keep that slow 512MB from being access, games that are not "optimized" through their driver will suffer greatly.

Let's hope there's a way to prevent access of that 512MB across all games.

The ENB dev found during some testing that the data that should be in the 512MB slow VRAM was actually in his system RAM. Could be something fancy Nvidia is doing but he thinks it just means that in actuality it behaves like you would expect a 3.5GB VRAM video card to behave. Which would actually be a good thing from a "how well will my 970 manage that slow VRAM 2 or 3 years from now" perspective. Would also completely avoid reducing the 3.5GB VRAM pools available bandwidth.

28 january 2015
One more update regarding "GTX 970 memory bug". Wrote another test to check how that slow 0.5 gb memory works and again it's the same thing which driver do for a long time, that memory is stored in RAM instead of VRAM, that's why it slow. Basically, this is standart behavior for the most videocards on the market (vram is physical vram + a bit ram). What it means on practice compared to another videocards? GTX 970 have 3.5 Gb of VRAM. What i see in articles with explanation from NVidia is half-lie and of course casual people are incompenent and better to not listen to them. I don't think it's something horrible to loose 0.5 gb, but it's bad that NVidia hide such information (my own videocard with 2 gb or vram have access to 2.5 gb and nobody annonced it as 2.0 fast and 0.5 slow). Myth busted.

http://enbdev.com/index_en.html

 

[rgallant]

Ever consider that the 970 is a defective GPU based on the 980?

So something has to be broken on it to be a 970.

You guys must have thought you were buying a 980 rebadged up just to save you money!

maybe you missed the part when the nv guy in the vid said they did this so they could include the dies with one bad L2
so they crippled all the 4gb full [8xL2] chips to 3.5 + .5gb
just to include those chips with one bad L2 along with the chips that did not have any defective L2's.
they could have made another sku with those missing 1-2 L2 = 3gb -3.5 gb of vram

 

[Grooveriding]

Hopefully nvidia gets slammed hard for deceiving everyone about the gtx 970's specs and memory performance numbers. Whether the lawyers get the biggest payout and buyers just see a small cheque is not really relevant. The hope is whatever year nvidia has to make a big payout in, that the payout is large enough to take a nice chunk out of their revenue for that year and make them think twice before the next time they pull a scam.

Nvidia is such an anti-customer company it is pretty abhorrent. Just like they shafted thousands of laptop OEMs and the people who bought laptops with their defective chips in them, the same thing has gone down with the 970. Once again they'll deny culpability and have to lose a lawsuit to be held accountable that they won't wind up paying out on until several years have gone by since they screwed up. Same story with the drivers that killed 2xx series card and the exploding 590 that got throttled with a driver patch, everything gets denied.

Guys, the 1/8th speed 500MB of memory is just a 'feature' that was advertised as being the full 224GB/s like the rest of the memory pool. They still have not amended the specs for the card's memory to indicate that only some of the memory is operating at that speed with the given stock clocks; http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications.

Shady.

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

if anything, this will drive future prices up.

 

[thilanliyan]

Nvidia is such an anti-customer company it is pretty abhorrent. Just like they shafted thousands of laptop OEMs and the people who bought laptops with their defective chips in them, the same thing has gone down with the 970. Once again they'll deny culpability and have to lose a lawsuit to be held accountable that they won't wind up paying out on until several years have gone by since they screwed up. Same story with the drivers that killed 2xx series card and the exploding 590 that got throttled with a driver patch

Shady.

People keep buying them though... Guess all those issues just don't effect enough people for them to care.

 

[garagisti]

People keep buying them though... Guess all those issues just don't effect enough people for them to care.

Do you see how many posts are here defending a bold faced lie? The comments section at guru3d was even worse, where people are being bashed for stating their opinions on being lied to. Some are just plain toeing the party line, suggesting we users should be thankful that they provided more than 3gb. LMAO... the devotion is almost cult like.

 

[Meghan54]

Do you see how many posts are here defending a bold faced lie? The comments section at guru3d was even worse, where people are being bashed for stating their opinions on being lied to. Some are just plain toeing the party line, suggesting we users should be thankful that they provided more than 3gb. LMAO... the devotion is almost cult like.

Or quietly paid for? :\

 

[stahlhart]

Do you see how many posts are here defending a bold faced lie? The comments section at guru3d was even worse, where people are being bashed for stating their opinions on being lied to. Some are just plain toeing the party line, suggesting we users should be thankful that they provided more than 3gb. LMAO... the devotion is almost cult like.

Or quietly paid for? :\

This thread is for discussing the article in the OP. Keep your personal opinions about other members out of it.

-- stahlhart

 

[soccerballtux]

well, it will make you upgrade your card faster, so it's actually going to make your PC faster, faster!

Thank you.

Jen-Sun, Nvidia

 

[Timorous]

The 970 is designed to save you money against the 980.

Something has to give. In this case it was some L2 cache and about 512mb of memory lol.

Yes and they advertised that what was missing were some CUDA cores and it had lower clock speeds on both the GPU and the VRAM. The memory was advertised in the same way as it was on the 980 so people expected it to work in the same way. This subversion of expectations is 100% deception.

 

[Riceninja]

i honestly don't get any so many people still defend nvidia over this. you can like a product but you don't owe any company blind loyalty, certainly not one with their business practices. and nv damn well don't care about you.

 

[BFG10K]

I didn't ask for a definition, and that's irrelevant. Is anandtech being sued? Nope.

nVidia's HQ (along with the lawsuit) is based in an English speaking country. Therefore English definitions are very much relevant.

They're being sued for false advertising. In the strictest sense, were the ROP and L2 cache specs advertised directly by Nvidia?

Yes, in the official reviewers' guide, sent to reviewers for the purpose of disseminating the information to thousands of readers.

If those specs were some kind of "unpublished insider information", they would've shipped with an NDA slapped on them.

AT goes beyond consumer advertising. While I appreciate that the specs are incorrect, we're talking the normal public here.

AT is a media outlet that publishes reviews for the express purpose of reaching as many readers as possible. If a review is not a form of advertising, why don't you explain to us what it actually is?

More specifically, if nVidia gains nothing of commercial value from reviews, why do they continually send out free cards?

 

[Ranulf]

I can't believe Nvidia actually turned on comments for that blog post.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Its quite interesting how they are going after nVIDIA for the VRAM issue where as no one has yet to go after all the smartphone manufacturers and their false storage space advertisements. Don't think i've ever used a phone that had 16GB total usable space.. and some would come with 6GB already filled with bloatware sheesh, making it a 10GB device.

 

[WelshBloke]

I can't believe Nvidia actually turned on comments for that blog post.

Yeah. Those comments are angry!

That had to be a mistake, you either try to PR something away or have an honest conversation about it. The blog post was definitely just a bit of PR that didn't really address any issues, there was going to be no plus side to leaving comments open on it.

 

[NIGELG]

Hopefully nvidia gets slammed hard for deceiving everyone about the gtx 970's specs and memory performance numbers. Whether the lawyers get the biggest payout and buyers just see a small cheque is not really relevant. The hope is whatever year nvidia has to make a big payout in, that the payout is large enough to take a nice chunk out of their revenue for that year and make them think twice before the next time they pull a scam.

Nvidia is such an anti-customer company it is pretty abhorrent. Just like they shafted thousands of laptop OEMs and the people who bought laptops with their defective chips in them, the same thing has gone down with the 970. Once again they'll deny culpability and have to lose a lawsuit to be held accountable that they won't wind up paying out on until several years have gone by since they screwed up. Same story with the drivers that killed 2xx series card and the exploding 590 that got throttled with a driver patch, everything gets denied.

Guys, the 1/8th speed 500MB of memory is just a 'feature' that was advertised as being the full 224GB/s like the rest of the memory pool. They still have not amended the specs for the card's memory to indicate that only some of the memory is operating at that speed with the given stock clocks; http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications.

Shady.

And yet you buy their cards.

Another way of teaching Nvidia a lesson is to not buy their products......at least until they get their act together.

 

[Techhog]

Except when i buy a product i expect it to work as advertised.

CF was and still is broken and i had driver problems for ever on games.

then one day 20% gain in FPS...

Now this is worse because they shipped a defective product and driver system and partially fixed it. I had to go Nvidia to get SLI since they couldnt fix CF on the 7970...

Uh, have you forgotten about that "amazing" Nvidia driver last year which significantly improved performance in CPU-limited games? Nobody complained about that, either. People aren't upset because of not getting good enough enough performance; it's because they flat-out lied about the card's specifications. If they had been upfront from the start, there would have been far less groaning and no lawsuit. The only reason I won't be buying a 970 is because of the lie. If they had been upfront with the card's specs from the start, I'd still see that it's a good performer at a good price and buy it anyway. You're only saying that Nvidia should keep lying to customers by defending them.