Lawsuit Filed Against Nvidia Over GTX 970 Specs Controversy

[quilciri]

@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 ?"

The analogy is bad. The major reason people bought the 970 is because of it's performance, not because it had 4GB of RAM. It's performance is exactly as advertised.

You can't display 1440p content on a 1080p monitor. There is nothing the 970's owners could do if the card had full speed access to the full 4GB that they can't do now.

 

[Titillating]

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.

The corrections were published in a separate article that specifically addressed this case. You are correct, however, in that the original review was not updated to reflect this.


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-specifications,28464.html

 

[hannibal]

This is a hard case to judge...
You can think that this card is as fast as it eats less electricity because we disabled not needed parts.
Or this card was advertised this way. Even though is as good as advertises, it did not meet the advertised specs.

All in all. What is important in this case. The value of the product, or the way it achieves the value (in this case speed of drawing graphics)
That monitor example above is not good because the picture quality is sharper with 1440p. In this case there are less rops than advertised, but the speed is as fast as advertised. The bigger problem is the memory. It has 4 Gb as advertised, but part of it is less speedy than consumer can expect. Though they did not say that all memory is as good as the rest of the pack.
It is more like those graphic cards, SSDs and mother boards that get worse parts after the test have been released. Making the product more or less about as fast as before, but using worse parts that may affect the working of the equipment in the long run. That happens all the time. And as far as I can say it is worse than this case...
On the other hand there has always been different binnings of certain CPUs and revisions that can make the product better.
What I hope is that this case can put some standards what can be done and what can not, but this example case is not wide enough to handle the big problem of making customers pay for manufacturers ill use of "product may not be exactly as advertised" dilemma.

 

[royalcrown]

What can they not do right now ? That isn't the point as I see it, what about in x years when software is on the edge of the performance envelope ? Those Resources will matter more to people that don't upgrade as often.

It still doesn't change the fact that it isn't true. I agree that it's probably not a performance issue at the moment. Why then didn't Nvidia just say they made an error and gave wrong specs as soon as possible ? For the same reason you only need a 400 watt PSU and they SAY 550 on their website. The same reason people buy 3.2 ghz vs 3. Because it is PERCIEVED as better and Nvidia knows this and either lied or decided not to correct it because 64 ROPS sounds better than 50 something.

@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 ?"

The analogy is bad. The major reason people bought the 970 because of it's performance, not because it had 4GB of RAM. It's performance is exactly as advertised.

You can't display 1440p content on a 1080p monitor. There is nothing the 970's owners could do if the card had full speed access to the full 4GB that they can't do now.

 

[neon neophyte]

The real issue here is that games developers are going to be developing games for 4gb at some point. 4gb is a standard in many cards, and many to come. Since the developers think so many cards have 4gb, they will develop for 4gb. Not 3.5. It could turn into a much bigger problem at some point.

 

[larkspur]

The corrections were published in a separate article that specifically addressed this case. You are correct, however, in that the original review was not updated to reflect this.

Tom's Hardware isn't a paper copy of the WSJ. You don't just release a subsequent paper edition with a blurb in the "corrections" section. Every time someone uses a search engine to look for GTX 970 reviews, they find the original review. To issue a correction for an online article/review requires that you update the original article/review. Contemporary Journalism 101...

 

[adpo]

While I agree that this was simply a minor mistake and I'm honestly loving the performance out of my 970, I do think that this lawsuit is necessary to re-establish a precedent for nVidia and other companies to make sure that they get their schiit together as far as marketing goes.

 

[royalcrown]

IMO if it's an honest mistake, then they shouldn't lose the case. If they lied, they should.

 

[azzazel_99]

This was blatant misdirection to sell cards that didn't match the advertising.

 

[zfreak280]

People, this is why competitors exist. If Nvidia does something you REALLY don't like, then don't buy their product again and buy an AMD. When AMD doesn't something you really don't like, then switch back. Competitors don't exist for you to become a mindless fanboy of, which some graphics cards buyers seem to do.

 

[somebodyspecial]

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.

You need to check up on how DR Dos case etc worked out. They can drag it out until they say, but your honor (10yrs later) today that card is worth $20, so we feel we only owe 10% of it's value so will be happy to pay the $2 of damage considering today it's useless junk just like dos (MS dragged that case out until they claimed it wasn't useful so only $20K...LOL ON BILLIONS of software sold between that DID use dos). Pointless unless the case could be resolved in a month Well that's a bit extreme, but you get the point. Another point they'd make 10yrs from now is "your honor $50 today buys them a card 2x faster than what you're claiming was damaged to a minor degree, so it's worth nothing as you'd be harming our low end sales at $50 of our current cards on 3nm tech", or some such, you get the point. Both valid by then. These cases rarely do anything for us but raise the price for all to recoup lawyer fees etc.

I'm also fairly certain they could easily pull in dozens of people off ANY street and ask them 3 questions:
Do you know what L2 cache is?
Do you know how many rops your card can do or even what rops are?
Do you know how much memory is on your video card?

1/10 may actually get those right, thus proving name, perf, recommendations from friends/stores etc sells more than rops or L2 etc. This case is easy to defeat on so many levels. This is no where near as bad as AMD shipping cards that would throttle as all reviews showed with 290's. The retails sucked and perf was NOT as good. And as noted you get 4GB, just not all the same speed (did they ever say it was all accessed the same? Usually it's just size, type and clock speed, not info about how it's accessed). There is no single gpu card made that can push 4K maxed so people saying that need to realize you always need two cards for this (or a card with two chips, until a few more shrinks probably that is). Hannibal's points about it being all over the industry is true too, and as a PC shop for 8yrs I saw this a lot for board and cards.

 

[bloc97]

I was wondering how they were able to sell those cards cheap...

 

[Calculatron]

Wow. Don't mess with gamers.

 

[sykozis]

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!

Maybe you should Google the last class-action suit brought against NVidia for their G84m and G86m mobile GPUs..... They lied to laptop makers about those GPU's and millions of people ended up with bricked laptops as a result.

 

[anthony8989]

My HTC One M7 and M8 were advertised to me with 2GB of RAM and they both have less. They just round up for marketing fluidity - you'll never see "GTX 1070 7.635432GB VRAM"

 

[neon neophyte]

uh, how do you figure your phone has less than the 2gb of ram advertised?

 

[athlondude]

OMG! So mad about that 1/4 of a frame per second I may or may not be missing out on I think I'll drag nvidia to court over it! Tell ya what think I'll drag western digital, Seagate, and Toshiba to court for all those hard drives I bought that didn't have the promised capacity. Heck why stop there, think I'll go after Microsoft for forcing me to buy a 64 bit is so it would see a full 4gb of ram or better. Please this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of people need to start abandoning the band wagon!

 

[neon neophyte]

OMG! So mad about that 1/4 of a frame per second I may or may not be missing out on I think I'll drag nvidia to court over it! Tell ya what think I'll drag western digital, Seagate, and Toshiba to court for all those hard drives I bought that didn't have the promised capacity. Heck why stop there, think I'll go after Microsoft for forcing me to buy a 64 bit is so it would see a full 4gb of ram or better. Please this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of people need to start abandoning the band wagon!

you are going to lose out on a lot more than 1/2 a frame if the memory usage goes over 3.5gb.

 

[fuzzion]

Nvidia will just get a fine and a lawfirm will stand to benefit. Typical day.

 

[anthony8989]

uh, how do you figure your phone has less than the 2gb of ram advertised?

Well, CPUz identifies 1.823 GB of RAM total - it was around 1.7 GB for my M7. Whether it's "usable" or not is irrelevant in this context because all 4 GB of VRAM on the GTX 970 are "usable" , it just so happens the last 512MB are accessed slower. So in this comparison, the phone manufacturers are less accurate in their advertisement than nVidia.
http://postimg.org/image/pj1bp46kf/

 

[anthony8989]

NV haters make me laugh.

You know it's funny, remember when Tom's and practically every other review site came to the conclusion that Radeon Dual Graphics actually hindered performance and reduced game-play quality . AMD advertised that technology as a means to increase gaming performance and still does to this day . That was and still is a blatant lie. And nobody attempts to sue them - probably because they're broke as @#$! and nobody would get a dime out them even if they tried.

 

[tominsac]

OMG like NVidia gag me with a spoon totally. I don't care if my carrrd performs as it should, I just want to sue someone and I don't care how stupid it is... you see, I'm a Gamer! laghlll. and I don't care if people lose their jobs, give me WOW and I don't care if a gtx 760 will give me 60fps. you see I live in my mothers basement, I'm 40 and overweight , TWINKIE MA, NOW!

 

[neon neophyte]

uh, how do you figure your phone has less than the 2gb of ram advertised?

Well, CPUz identifies 1.823 GB of RAM total - it was around 1.7 GB for my M7. Whether it's "usable" or not is irrelevant in this context because all 4 GB of VRAM on the GTX 970 are "usable" , it just so happens the last 512MB are accessed slower. So in this comparison, the phone manufacturers are less accurate in their advertisement than nVidia.
http://postimg.org/image/pj1bp46kf/

Usable ram... way to completely misrepresent your case. Yes, that infact matters. Your analogy is horrible.

 

[db188]

but the facts are that people made purchasing decisions based on false advertisement that the company did nothing about until there was enough stink made about it. and performance issues weren't immediately explainable, specifically because of Nvidia's duplicity. tech reviewers had to dig and needle Nvidia for answers, to which they eventually and reluctantly fessed up to when it became apparent they could no longer hide behind their false advertising. this is exactly the kind of shameful behavior that company's need to be called on and punished for.

 

[wtfxxxgp]

@TNT27 - that's such a poor comparison. The issue isn't about speed or power. It's about the upper limits of ability being compromised. 190HP would refer to power. The card still performs as well as it did in benchmarks, so the power and speed are there. I still say it's quite impressive what they've achieved with this card, especially now that you know that it is actually LOWER spec'd than initially advertised (so that V6 is actually a flat-4 turbo), and still attains insane numbers. I agree that Nvidia should have been more forthcoming about it all, but a lawsuit about this is just opportunistic. Say what you will, there are only a few people that will actually be hurt by the announcement of the original specifications (in the greater scheme of things I mean), and those people may already have experienced crappy performance at extreme quality and resolution levels - or maybe not.

Nvidia's product remains a great one, despite this revelation.