Should you be compensated for the GTX 970 issues and spec changes?

[007ELmO]

Half the people in this thread went SLI and that's where the problem really shows its head.

BTW AMD did strike while the iron is hot by lowering 290x prices in the process...

 

[bzb_Elder]

Yes we did pay for the reported performance which hasn't changed, but we did also buy the card for it's reported specifications which were incorrect. This is in essence false advertising (even if accidental). Do you feel like you should be compensated in some way for this?

It's so easy to get off track with all the nonsense that is posted.

To the OP, I didn't purchase one of these cards so I can't say for sure how I'd feel, but I don't believe any "compensation" is required to make this right. If you're not happy with the card, return it. As long as they (retailers / NVidia) take the card back, what more do you want?

 

[digitaldurandal]

It's so easy to get off track with all the nonsense that is posted.

To the OP, I didn't purchase one of these cards so I can't say for sure how I'd feel, but I don't believe any "compensation" is required to make this right. If you're not happy with the card, return it. As long as they (retailers / NVidia) take the card back, what more do you want?

Well for a large portion of users this will qualify as compensation because the return period has passed. Nvidia has offered refunds for the devices already.

I don't think anyone thinks they should keep the card and get money in return, although I think a move like that would win over Nvidia purchasers that feel like they were duped but do not want to go through the hassle of a return, or who don't feel the issue was enough for a return but would think twice before buying an Nvidia product on launch.

 

[Pneumothorax]

As a relatively new MSI 4G Gaming 970 owner purchased from NewEgg, I've been pondering this situation for several weeks now.

Clearly, while performance in today's benchmarks are what they are, it's the future proofing aspect of the misrepresentation that bothers me.

290X is not an option for me, as again, I'm looking for future-proofing, which would include DirectX 12 support.

While some have made the leap to the 980, I'm reluctant to reward Nvidia for their dishonest business practices (not to mention spending the additional $200).

I think where we this *could* become more of an issue is with the release of the price-comparable AMD 3xx card. Not sure which one that would be, perhaps the 380X.

I believe if given the option to return the 970 for AMD's 3xx generation equivalent (assuming DirectX 12, etc.), many would jump on the opportunity.

While it's never a good idea to rush a release, if AMD could advance the release and strike while the iron is hot, they may be able to pick up some major market share.

Just my thoughts.

If you're never go to run SLI at >1080P then the 970 is decent if not great card. My 1600P SLI setup is going to run out of VRAM much quicker.

This has to be one of the most idiotic analogies I have seen on these forums. Yeah, its pretty funny:thumbsdown:

It's not meant to be funny, but when people get deceived by somebody and then reward the deceiver with even more money, it's ludicrous.

 

[garagisti]

I agree with this. Don't most enthusiasts purchase mid/high end cards based upon real world performance, not specs? You know, based upon benchmarks from the sites that we all know and trust - specifically for the games we play, or will play?


Unless officially posting in these forums on behalf of NVidia, I'd be careful about claiming they did a cost analysis and determined that lying would be more profitable. (libel)

I swear, if I read another post telling me that I need 4 GB for 1080 gaming, I may just start to believe it. I'm starting to feel like I need to get rid of my 2 GB GTX670 as soon as possible. And I surely need to tell my son to stop using his 1.25 GB GTX570 because it won't run the games he's currently playing -- it's strange though because he'll have to stop playing so I can take the card out of his system...

Good advice about libel. There hasn't been any official word from Nvidia which suggests that any customer could return it. Libel laws are indeed stringent in some countries, for example UK, since last year though, they have relaxed the laws a little bit. Before all you need to do to win was file a complaint, it was that skewed in favour of rich and mighty. Sure it is possibly bad in USA too, but you have something called freedom of speech, and if you can prove that you're not suggesting, but were guessing, may be you could get off with a warning.

 

[stockwiz]

I want one of these cards assuming they worked as intended with 4GB of real memory that doesn't cripple your FPS when you hit some magic number but won't pay what nvidia is currently charging for this card so I'll wait to see what AMD has to offer in what they have coming. Not paying for a 980... too expensive for the amount of gaming I do.. will not reward nvidia for their dishonestly. As soon as they drop the price of the 970 to the $250 range (without rebates which I do not do) I'll bite.

 

[taltamir]

There's many nVidia apologists in this thread, trying to turn mountains into molehills. It's one thing after the other that makes them so dang unappealing. "Battered Wife Syndrome" is exactly what I was thinking. All these people in uproar and furor at nVidia for lying to them to take their hard earned money, only to return their cards and get different nVidia cards that only make nVidia profit more.

Speak with your wallets people. What good is it to keep buying from people that screw you over, time and time again?

The issue is that people have no choice. Its "battered wife of the last man on earth" syndrome. You have literally only 2 choices, nvidia and AMD. And AMD is hilariously behind in terms of product quality as well as having a ton of their own issues and their own history of abuses.

 

[UaVaj]

I want one of these cards assuming they worked as intended with 4GB of real memory that doesn't cripple your FPS when you hit some magic number but won't pay what nvidia is currently charging for this card so I'll wait to see what AMD has to offer in what they have coming. Not paying for a 980... too expensive for the amount of gaming I do.. will not reward nvidia for their dishonestly. As soon as they drop the price of the 970 to the $250 range (without rebates which I do not do) I'll bite.

for enjoyable and playable gaming.

unless you are running 970 x3 or 3k. you will NOT hit that vram wall, nor the ROP wall, nor the L2 wall.

so why lose sleep over it?



for $250. just get a 290x and starting enjoying life/gaming today.

 

[taltamir]

for enjoyable and playable gaming.

This is false, people have been hitting it. This is in fact how nvidia's duplicity was discovered in the first place

 

[Creig]

The issue is that people have no choice. Its "battered wife of the last man on earth" syndrome. You have literally only 2 choices, nvidia and AMD. And AMD is hilariously behind in terms of product quality as well as having a ton of their own issues and their own history of abuses.

Whoa, whoa, whoa... "hilariously behind in terms of product quality" and "a ton of issues"? Have you so quickly forgotten Bumpgate? And the infamous Nvidia "turn off the cooling fan so the video card cooks" driver? And right now we're in the middle of Nvidia's latest PR nightmare: The GTX970 Memorygate. Nvidia is the clear leader here in customer "abuses".

 

[Scoobyd00]

Good luck with this and I hope you can get something from them.

Nvidia has a history of this and it's why I have not bought one thing that has an nvidia chipset or gpu.

Back in 2005 many people payed for the highest end card. The 6800GT (series) was a $400.00+ card that had a built in Video Processor (vpu) and many people bought it because it was meant to be a fantastic gaming card plus great for encoding video.

Problem that was found shortly after release was that the VPU didnt work. Even watching a video would send the cpu to 100% load, let alone trying to encode one. For months nvidia promised a driver update to fix it. Until they figured out it was a hardware problem and nothing that drivers would help. By then any exchange time from where you bought it had passed.
No refunds, no credit towards a working card and no trade in's towards a working card. Basically a big FU from nvidia as they laughed all the way to the bank.

BUT

For an addition $30.00 they would sell you software that would help and drop the cpu load down to 80% on your broken card.

They have not seen 1 cent of my money in ten years


Nice to see they have not changed their business practices and I hope some people will not give them money in the future because of it.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Whoa, whoa, whoa... "hilariously behind in terms of product quality" and "a ton of issues"? Have you so quickly forgotten Bumpgate? And the infamous Nvidia "turn off the cooling fan so the video card cooks" driver? And right now we're in the middle of Nvidia's latest PR nightmare: The GTX970 Memorygate. Nvidia is the clear leader here in customer "abuses".

I was the unlucky owner of an Nforce 4 socket 939 motherboard.

 

[UaVaj]

This is false, people have been hitting it. This is in fact how nvidia's duplicity was discovered in the first place

allocated vram and needed vram are apples and oranges.

do any of you have any "actually" experience as to what happens when the vram ceiling is hit?

rest assure 970 is NOT hitting the VRAM limit during "practical, enjoyable and playable" gaming. even with 970 x3. it is still hard to hit that 3.5gb vram limit.



this is like complaining about the tires on your car not rated for 150mph.. when the fastest your car will ever go is 130mph. most of the time you are exceeding the speed limit going 80mph on the interstate.

only way to get those tire to even go 150mph is to roll the tires on a 150mph treadmill. not exactly practical use for a tire.

how many of you plan to roll your tires on a treadmill? or do you plan to actually use them on your car?



btw. when the vram limit is hit. the game comes to a hard significant pause. then resumes. then hard significant pause. repeat.
all the stutter being reported/blamed as vram is simply the gpu running out of steam.




to give credit where credit is due.
perhaps nvidia should not "ALLOCATE" anything into that last 500mb of slower vram. accessing that much slower vram can cause such stutter.
perhaps that is the problem. as for the 3.5gb running out. clearly not the case.

..

 

[UaVaj]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMA9xKn0DaE

here is a video showing the effect of hitting the vram ceiling.
to even get to the this point. had to run two games side by side and also recording.
not exactly practical. nor enjoyable. nor playable.






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9W1V-Eyjkg

as for this guy claiming he hitting the vram limit.
he is actually running out of gpu steam. he is averaging mid 30fps with broken SLI operating at around 60%.
what exactly did he expect?

 

[SlowSpyder]

People have already linked to sites that show how choppy the FPS get on the GTX970 in some situations when the vram limit is hit. In one of your videos the GPU's are only at ~60-65% use and it is stuttering, that would mean the GPU did not run out of oomph. It ran out of vram causing the stutter. There's no reason to deny this, the issue has been shown plainly already. Nvidia was not truthful with the specs or how the memory worked on the GTX970, and in some situations the limitations can be seen. Not sure why anyone would deny this at this point...?

 

[2is]

Seems UaVaj is trying very hard to convince everyone this problem doesn't exist. With phrases like "practical, enjoyable and playable" which don't actually have a strict definition other that ones own interpretation.

Lets also not forget that it wasn't just a VRAM issue with the 970, the GPU specs different that originally advertised as well.

 

[3DVagabond]

The issue is that people have no choice. Its "battered wife of the last man on earth" syndrome. You have literally only 2 choices, nvidia and AMD. And AMD is hilariously behind in terms of product quality as well as having a ton of their own issues and their own history of abuses.

This is really sad. It sounds like you are making excuses for your own behavior rather than nVidia's. AMD is no where near as bad as you are making them out to be.

 

[jackstar7]

nV knows it is all about the feels.

 

[AnandThenMan]

btw. when the vram limit is hit. the game comes to a hard significant pause. then resumes. then hard significant pause. repeat.

Exactly. Except the 970 hits this wall at 3.5GB not 4.0. Even worse is the game engine sees 4 so will use it if needed, this is the core of the problem. If the game engine only used 3.5 then the stuttering would not occur.

We've already seen on the driver level memory usage capped to 3.5, in the exact same test the memory footprint of the 980 was 4GB. Unfortunately the driver cannot always accomplish the memory clamping, at least not so far. Either way the 970 is effectively a 3.5GB card with a 512meg buffer that causes frame pacing issues or worse.

 

[UaVaj]

Seems UaVaj is trying very hard to convince everyone this problem doesn't exist. With phrases like "practical, enjoyable and playable" which don't actually have a strict definition other that ones own interpretation.

Lets also not forget that it wasn't just a VRAM issue with the 970, the GPU specs different that originally advertised as well.

the problem does exist. never said it never existed.

just that the problem exist in unpractical scenarios.





DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE MY WORD ALONE. see link.

"The specification revelations didn’t change the fact that the GTX 970 was still a beast of a card for the price, and subsequent testing by PC Perspective, Guru3D, and Hardware Canucks showed that negative effects are difficult to produce in the real world, at least in single card setups. To use more than 3.5GB in most games requires playing at very high resolutions (typically 4K or multi-monitor situations) at dismally low frame rates, with anti-aliasing settings cranked.
But multi-card SLI setups could theoretically be more affected, as further PC Perspective testing suggested."

 

[96Firebird]

Still confused on how I was able to play FC4 at around 3800MB VRAM usage without gameplay coming to a hard stop. Do I have a magical 970?

 

[UaVaj]

Exactly. Except the 970 hits this wall at 3.5GB not 4.0. Even worse is the game engine sees 4 so will use it if needed, this is the core of the problem. If the game engine only used 3.5 then the stuttering would not occur.

We've already seen on the driver level memory usage capped to 3.5, in the exact same test the memory footprint of the 980 was 4GB. Unfortunately the driver cannot always accomplish the memory clamping, at least not so far. Either way the 970 is effectively a 3.5GB card with a 512meg buffer that causes frame pacing issues or worse.

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

 

[jackstar7]

Still confused on how I was able to play FC4 at around 3800MB VRAM usage without gameplay coming to a hard stop. Do I have a magical 970?

My understanding is that if the card can use that last half-gig for stuff that is not needing to be swapped, then it can use the 3.5gig to handle what's changing often and you won't run into the problem. But I believe it is situational.

And you have a magical card.

 

[2is]

That link doesn't say what your words said. You make it sound like it's almost impossible to run into the issue. PCWorld clearly points out how some setups would be more prone to the issue.

 

[96Firebird]

And you have a magical card.

Knew it! I should be able to get at least a grand for this baby. :thumbsup: