That's expected. Wouldn't be surprised if you recommended a $350 GTX970 over a $400 R9 380X. Since you won't ever consider AMD cards, to you it makes no difference what their respective performance or price/performance is. Therefore, you can't provide objective advice to your friends/relatives. This automatically means that any card NV sells between $200-500 you'd automatically recommend, as long as it's NV. Now tell us something we don't know.
It's sad, isn't it. Between the $100 GTX750Ti and overpriced $550 GTX980 that is barely 10% faster than a $310 MSI Lighting R9 290X today, NV has a $450 gap. Shocking but given the brand loyalty and the average knowledge of the types of customers that only keep buying NV, NV won't even skip a beat. Believe me even overpriced VRAM frame times stuttering mess like a 960 will sell at $200 by truckloads. Ignorance is a bliss.
Call it what you like, but I feel it is design flaw. The last 500MB of memory on the 970 cannot be read from all 8 memory controllers at once, unlike the 980. And this results in a measurable performance loss between 3.5GB and 4.0GB of memory usage.
Who cares what you feel, it's not a design flaw.
I also wouldn't call it a 'flaw', but there certainly is a problem. But I think that problem is mostly due to how Nvidia marketed the card, and how they were silent about the true specs during and after reviews. Nvidia has some egg on their face in this one. How they react to it can make a huge difference, though.
It is a marketing oversight, they've said as much. It's not a mystery.
It may have started as a marketing oversight, but it turned it ended looking like purposeful deception.
I'd buy a marketing oversight if near launch they corrected the information and reviewers put up the real specs soonish after. But in 4-5 months since launch that didn't happen until their hand was forced. There is no way the powers that be at Nvidia didn't know at this point that the specs they provided and were shown in reviews was incorrect. They didn't share that the card had potential limitations in performance at certain settings.
Unless you work at NVIDIA, this is just pure speculation. Nobody knows what caused this mistake and why it wasn't noticed. Could simply be they have incompetent people in charge of press relations and marketing, who knows. I try not to cast aspersions when all the information isn't there.
I totally disagree. It is in their best interest (if they don't get caught) in fact the deception helped Nvidia sell over a million video cards. And I simply don't buy that it was an honest mistake, it doesn't take months to notice something like this, not credible.It isn't in NVIDIA's interest to purposely deceive it's customers,
Unless you work at NVIDIA, this is just pure speculation. Nobody knows what caused this mistake and why it wasn't noticed. Could simply be they have incompetent people in charge of press relations and marketing, who knows. I try not to cast aspersions when all the information isn't there. It certainly LOOKS like one thing but could be an honest mistake, just don't know. I do think the marketing guys saying it was a communication problem is to cover their ass and I bet someone will be fired shortly and I'd love to get the full inside story as to what happened. It isn't in NVIDIA's interest to purposely deceive it's customers, especially when they're close to burying AMD once and for all.
this is just pure speculation
Yeah I find it very hard to believe as well, but not out of the realm of possibility that specs is a marketing mistake at release. After release I find it almost impossible that most people associated with public information didn't know. I worked in a few tech companies as all of them had multiple approval processes on any consumer accessible document (release notes, docs, etc.) so things like this don't happen (ie. since your name is associated with approval of the document you better make sure you review the document thoroughly).
Ok but we're talking about people who are completely brand agnostic who are gaming at 1080p, with 60 FPS minimums.
Nvidia shines at 1080p and this user will turn down settings to get to a 60 FPS minimum.
If he had expressed interest in DSR/Ultra Textures then I'd say go with the R9 290x.
Also, lets be real here, a lot of big announcements recently are gameworks titles. They perform horribly on AMD GPUs at launch. Yes, I get it already, the R9 290x is a great card as a whole. But it doesn't fit every gamers needs and certainly if you're not going above 1080p and you want to push as many frames as possible, you get a GTX 970.
Give me a break. You'll tell me nobody from Nvidia noticed that in 5 months? 5 freakin months man.
There are 8,800 employees at Nvidia.
Honest mistake? Yeah right. Even if I was the greatest Nvidia fanboy I would just turn my back on them. I can tell you that my next GPUs purchase, unlike my previous, I will not consider Nvidia.
The brand agnostic buyer would probably consider that the 970 3.5/0.5 GB card is at it's peak now and will continue to suffer as new games demand that extra VRAM (even at 1080p). There is a good chance 4k monitor prices will hit $250 within the 2 or so years lifespan that the user would use the card too (just a side point).
After going through 3 newegg reps, I got one who battled with her supervisor and got me store credit on my 970's. 290x CF here I come!
Utilizing graphics memory after 3.5 GB can result into performance issues as the card needs to manage some really weird stuff in memory, it's nearly load-balancing. But fact remains it seems to be handling that well, it’s hard to detect and replicate oddities. If you unequivocally refuse to accept the situation at hand, you really should return your card and pick a Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 980. However, if you decide to upgrade to a GTX 980, you will be spending more money and thus rewarding Nvidia for it. Until further notice our recommendation on the GeForce GTX 970 stands as it was, for the money it is an excellent performer. But it should have been called a 3.5 GB card with a 512MB L3 GDDR5 cache buffer.
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We do hope to never ever see a graphics card being configured like this ever again as it would get toasted by the media, for what Nvidia did here. It’s simply not the right thing to do. Last note, right now Nvidia is in full damage control mode. We submitted questions on this topic early in the week towards Nvidia US, in specific Jonah Alben SVP of GPU Engineering. On Monday Nvidia suggested a phonecall with him, however due to appointments we asked for a QA session over email. To date he or anyone from the US HQ has not responded to these questions for Guru3D.com specifically. Really, to date we have yet to receive even a single word of information from Nvidia on this topic.
We slowly wonder though why certain US press is always so much prioritized and is cherry picked … Nvidia ?
Well ****, I totally misread that graph set before . Guess my 4k monitor wasn't at fault after all... which sucks, because I already sent it back for a refund and had gotten a killer deal on it originally.
Maxwell 2.0 chips are basically the 2600K of GPU's . In general I agree though.
Did a little testing of my own using afterburner's frametime readings and other monitoring tools... it's not FCAT but it's very accurate regardless. Here's what I got...
So yeah, using SLI GTX 970's to drive high-res high-settings will result in massive, massive frametime issues, even if the framerate over a given second remains reasonable. It is basically an unplayable mess at that point when using 3.7-4.0gb of VRAM. If you can stay around/below 3.5gb of actual usage, which it does its best to do, frametimes are consistent and tight as you would expect. The framerate averaged around 38, meaning in a perfect world the frametimes would be right around 26.3ms for each frame.
As an interesting aside, when finding my settings to test with I noticed it would literally, over the course of several seconds, try to work its way back down to below 3.5gb of usage if it went over, until I set things high enough that it couldn't and would just stick at 3.7-3.8gb+ the whole time. Otherwise it would fight and keep pingponging from ~3.4gb directly to ~3.7gb and back repeatedly before finally settling at ~3.4gb. That's probably the drivers at work, there.
I couldn't say, honestly, but my cpu usage isn't more than ~70% average on the cores during gameplay typically so presumably there's plenty of headroom on that front.
Just to elaborate a little (copying another forum post I wrote) even with a similar framerate, frametimes get completely torpedo'd once you pass the 3.5gb threshold. For example that graph was ~38fps, but if you get below the 3.5gb mark outright with your settings a ~50fps gameplay has consistent frametimes with little variance, bouncing between ~15-25ms of render time as you'd expect, sometimes a little more or less.
The ~38fps though passing the 3.5gb vram mark, however, ends up having times constantly going between ~35ms to 150ms of time to render each frame, with many spikes over 200ms.