Lawsuit Filed Against Nvidia Over GTX 970 Specs Controversy

[Guest]

The specifics of the lawsuit include the claim that Nvidia and Gigabyte misled customers about the actual specs of the GTX 970, specifically the memory capacity, number of ROPs, and the capacity of the L2 cache.

Lawsuit Filed Against Nvidia Over GTX 970 Specs Controversy : Read more

 

[agentbb007]

I bought a GTX 970 so can I get some money back too? BTW I really like the card though

 

[zloginet]

nvidia wants to fix this the right way... offer free GTX 980 upgrades. Perfect.

 

[dstarr3]

I get that false advertising, as mild as a case as this may be, is obviously pretty shady. But, who really buys graphics cards based on a spec sheet and not benchmarks and in-game performance?

"This card has an L2 cache of 2mb? That's the card for me!"
-weeks later-
"WHAT?! This card only has a 1.75mb L2 cache?! Even though it still delivers exactly the experience I wanted, I'm furious!"

 

[hakesterman]

He has no lawsuit because on the outside of the box it states the actual spec's and i am sure they updated that before they released it, they alway's do.

 

[neon neophyte]

dstarr. that might be true except for ram.

a card will give you the performance you expect until you tap out the ram fully. if a game is designed to use over 3.5gb you performance will fall off sharply.

 

[Shankovich]

The 970 is still a great card, but I agree, nVidia deserves this. It's about consumer rights, and false advertising should be punished.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I do agree that this is a good lawsuit, Nvidia should not have been hiding the past few months over this issue. They instead should have addressed it or apologized and been mature about it.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Wow how sad. People just love to sue. Sure NVidia gave the wrong specs, but i mean sheesh, that's just one little mistake nvidia did.

Give them a break, every now and then expect a mistake. But when I see people actually suing companies for such a little thing makes me mad.

I do agree that Nvidia shouldn't do this again, and if they did keep lying about their products then sure you could sue, but this is the first time i've ever seen this happen, give the company a 2nd chance!

 

[RedJaron]

I hope this suit gets tossed out. I think DStarr has it right. The card performs the same now as it did when it was reviewed ( possibly even better if drivers have improved performance. ) It's so ridiculous how litigious the US has become. Nothing is ever my problem, it's all someone else's fault. The only people who might have a legitimate complaint are those who bought twin 970s for hi-resolution displays because that's where the limitations will really start to show.

 

[TNT27]

[quotemsg=15356726,0,1695593]Wow how sad. People just love to sue. Sure NVidia gave the wrong specs, but i mean sheesh, that's just one little mistake nvidia did.

Give them a break, every now and then expect a mistake. But when I see people actually suing companies for such a little thing makes me mad.

I do agree that Nvidia shouldn't do this again, and if they did keep lying about their products then sure you could sue, but this is the first time i've ever seen this happen, give the company a 2nd chance![/quotemsg]

Think of it this way, you bought a car that was listed to have 190HP, V6, 3.4 L, etc.
However the company comes back an says hey it cant do 190HP, its only rated for 170 HP, still the V6 though, but it still goes fast, just not as much as we said it would! How would you feel? You paid for 190HP, yet get 170HP, and all they can say well it still goes fast, just not as fast as you paid for it to go.

 

[quilciri]

Chris Porter: "Companies need an "Are you <mod edit> me?" defense."

 

[elbert]

The problem I see with this is specs means very little. In technology the specs really are no indication of performance and thus we relay on reviews and benchmarks. Point is everyone know what performance to expect. This isn't the same as claiming the product is one thing and being another. In no way was this a cheat perpetrated on the consumer nor would the corrected numbers have changed the consumers purchase. I would agree tho Nvidia should create a trade up program giving you the full price of your 970 purchase toward the 980..

 

[SteelCity1981]

I don't have a problem with this lawsuit, because it helps deter companies from doing shady practices like this. I mean yes, one can look at this and say well this lawsuit is based on something that has little to no impact on actual real world performance, but the point is that when you label something on your product, it should correspond with the actual product as advertised and not anything less. Hard Drive companies got in trouble doing the exact same thing a decade ago and it took a lawsuit for hard drive companies to stop displaying misleading capacities on their boxes that weren't actually there.

 

[neon neophyte]

the ram thing was shady as all hell you guys. a 2gb card and a 4gb card will perform identically in most scenarios. does that mean the 2gb card is as good as the 4gb card? NO.

 

[azzazel_99]

companies including nvidia have done this <mod edit> for years! It's about time they get their hand slapped. I for one buy my video cards based on specs AND performance. I DO NOT buy solely on performance alone. The SPECS are what give us an idea of how something will do in next generation of games. Performance reviews only tell us how they do as of right now on current games. If they lied about their cards then should be punished. Just like the misleading <mod edit> of dual gpu cards claiming to have double the memory like the 690, 295x2 from amd or the 7990, or the titan z or any other card. This is a <mod edit> way for them to fool the unexpecting customer into thinking they are getting something they really aren't. I for one am tired of seeing people getting dooped into this. I hope nvidia loses and gets the <mod edit> sued out of them! Hopefully this will be a game changer for amd and nvidia both.

<Moderator Warning: Watch your language in these forums>

 

[nitrium]

Make sure you check out the shocking interview with an nVidia engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0 ;-)

 

[WyomingKnott]

It being a class-action suit, everyone gets those tiny payments at the end. Perhaps everyone will receive 8 ROPS with 0.25 MB of L2 cache?

 

[ssddx]

while i do agree that there should be some recourse to amend the situation, what people are demanding is quite ridiculous. condsider a few things... A) you are getting a 3.5gb card for the price you would have paid for a 2gb card just months earlier. B) the performance specs are exactly the same as tested by reviewers. C) technically nvidia went out of their way to make the last 512mb of ram useable instead of disabling it alltogether like they could have done. D) when amd openly sent out better than production samples for review where was the recourse then?

we should definitely demand some better and more accurate specifications and architecture diagrams for future releases but i think people are getting a bit carried away with this current movement. what exactly are they going to replace them with? the twice as expensive gtx980? the hot-as-an-oven r9-290x? for the money spent the gtx970 still offers the best value we have seen in years for a non top-tier card and is still the best buy on the market.

 

[The_One_and_Only]

Good. 4GB of RAM that works all at the same speed and 3.5 GB and 512 Mb of differrent speed ram combo is not the same thing. Just like advertising 1200 cores on your gpu but really 600 of those cores are on a different smaller chip running half as fast due to architecture differences. Not the same and not acceptable. What if you got these to run at 1440p or 4k? Instantly not such good card all of sudden. That is the problem.

 

[larkspur]

You'd think a tech editor would have updated the specs in his original review of the GTX 970 when news broke a month ago. But alas, Tom's continues to publish the wrong specs in the chart on the first page of the official GTX 970 review and actually hasn't bothered to update the review itself. There is no mention of the proper specs or unique vram configuration at all. Nvidia's "marketing mistake" continues to be proliferated every time someone reads Tom's official review of the GTX 970.

If you want to be accurate, you update your articles when you discover a mistake or a misstatement. I pointed this out a month ago in the site feedback forum and was told it would be passed along to the editor. But I see that either I've been ignored, or Tom's Editors consider accuracy in their published articles to be a very low priority. Here's Tom's GTX 970 review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,3941.html

And no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist or a fanboi, nor do I own a 970 - I just expect journalists to provide accurate information in a tech review and correct mistakes when they become aware of them.

 

[somebodyspecial]

Good luck with the suit...ROFL. Anandtech can't even find a corner case yet, and I'm sure NV has tried themselves (with FAR more resources). First words out of there mouth will be "did it affect performance sir?". ...... "ummm, errr, uhhh, no". Case dismissed clown. You have to show some kind of harm I'd think, and that seems pretty tough to do. Also not sure what boxes are showing, and if NV ever said this publicly on their site or vendors just ran with info that wasn't (exactly) correct. I don't see anything nefarious if perf is unaffected and benchmarks are the same either way.

NV haters make me laugh. We don't need silly lawsuits eating the last gpu company we have. AMD is already becoming a moot company. I might say different if the card actually sucked in some way, but it is a great product and performs exactly as reviews showed. Mountain out of a molehill here. Love the products people, not the company (or hate the products...). IF stupid suits like this win, we all just pay higher prices or get less R&D. With AMD about to be the same vs. NV as Intel vs. AMD in cpu, we really need both sides MAKING WADS of cash (which neither side does anyway) for R&D. For AMD that means fire all management, they're always making bad decisions and have been for years (console instead of core products! DUH). For NV lets just hope they finally get back to 2007 profit levels this year. People need to read some balance sheets and quarterly reports before they start thinking they're ripping us off. That is total BS or they'd be making more money than 2007 (nearly a decade of lower profits, and AMD just lost 6B+ over last 10-12 years). Quit whining. Also note NV would be even worse off without the Intel 66mil/quarter, so they aren't making more than 1/2 of 2007 in profit if intel suit ends payments in 2016.

Would you all like gpu upgrades every 4 years because they need to sell the same cards for that long to make any money? LOL. It's coming if one of the two doesn't start cracking a Billion a year in PROFIT (not revenue). R&D isn't free, and at 1/2 the profit of 2007 (800mil rougly, taking out Intel payments quarterly they're 400mil now for years), that R&D gets might tough even for NV and at no profit yearly, AMD is just basically falling apart now while being attacked on all fronts with falling R&D for the last 3-4yrs. Check the balance sheets etc people.

 

[TNT27]

Specs do affect performance, higher resolutions and next gen games could need that full 4gb ram in order to reach full potential. A 970 with actual 4gb gddr5 like it said it had will do better in terms of performance vs the true gtx 970 that we have in newer games and higher resolutions.

 

[Guest]

You buy a car. It's advertised as having air bags. Turns out it doesn't. Who cares that it still runs at the same speed, handles the same way as advertised?

When you're going to need those air bags, they won't be there. Nvidia will lose this lawsuit. Keep your receipts everybody, you're going to be able to claim that 20-50$ check 5-10 years from now.

 

[royalcrown]

@somebodyspecial:

me - "I bought this 1440p monitor and it's only 1080p"

you - "Does it work ?"

me - "I bought it over a similar one BECAUSE it was 1440p"

you - "well they only lied a little bit, so it's cool."

You don't think those extra ROPS and such would have made any difference ?

So it's okay if it's a little, it's still the truth then ?"