Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang Apologizes For 'Miscommunication' On GTX 970 Specs

[cwolf78]

once the first 3.5gb is fully utilised the remaining .5gb kicks in and a vast performance decrease as the first 3.5gb of RAM matches the slowest RAM module speed. 0

Umm, that's not how it works. Please read this for a detailed explanation:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

 

[Outlander_04]

to those saying it has 4gb get over, yes it does but it's split RAM. The issue is the first 3.5gb of RAM runs at A speed and the other .5gb at B speed. Now A speed is faster than B speed which is the issue. Whenever there is more than one module of RAM utilise the memory architecture will always run it at the slowest modules speed. Herin lies the problem - once the first 3.5gb is fully utilised the remaining .5gb kicks in and a vast performance decrease as the first 3.5gb of RAM matches the slowest RAM module speed. This is what customers are complaing about, yes the specs/benchmarks are impressive but these are taking at optimal values (the deceit) whilst only utilising up to 3.5gb. There saying it has 4gb get over it is quite an unintelligent statement. As while true it does but if you are to utilise over 75% of its ram you will do so at a dramatically vast decrease in rendering performance. It's like a V12 with 2 blown cylinders - yes it's a V12 but it can only run at the capacity of a V10

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured?
No
Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate complaint?
No

 

[rhysiam]

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured?
No
Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate complaint?
No

The advertising about the amount of RAM was correct. BUT, on launch they released tech specs to reviewers stating that the card had 64 ROPs and 2MB L2 Cache... in fact it has only 56 ROPs and 1.75MB L2 Cache. Is that the end of the world? No. But it's not nothing!

So yes, their advertising was misleading. They published incorrect specs for the card that went uncorrected for 4 months and was only addressed once complaints about performance stated to gain traction.

I wholeheartedly agree that some of this rhetoric is overblown hype, but to dismiss it as nothing isn't fair either IMHO.

 

[Outlander_04]

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured?
No
Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate complaint?
No

The advertising about the amount of RAM was correct. BUT, on launch they released tech specs to reviewers stating that the card had 64 ROPs and 2MB L2 Cache... in fact it has only 56 ROPs and 1.75MB L2 Cache. Is that the end of the world? No. But it's not nothing!

So yes, their advertising was misleading. They published incorrect specs for the card that went uncorrected for 4 months and was only addressed once complaints about performance stated to gain traction.

I wholeheartedly agree that some of this rhetoric is overblown hype, but to dismiss it as nothing isn't fair either IMHO.

Good points

 

[Slesreth]

Of course this announcement releases the day after I purchase a computer outfitted with a GTX 970 inside it.

The pending excite in receiving a new machine.... Shattered.

I think its to easy for them to play, "We were never told" as total scapegoat excuse to get out of the legal trap they could trigger if they told us, "We never told you"

Would have got the 980, if I could only have talked my self into cost/performance ratio, but it was to steep for this one.

Oh well, its only a barebones machine, pre-assembled. Always new toys I can add on, later...

 

[AMDHTPC]

Nvidia has always been a scumbag company. I purchased 1 Nvidia card in my lifetime the original Geforce 256 which was revolutionary at the time. Once 3Dfx bit the dust Nvidia picked their bones clean and offered virtually no tech support for 3Dfx owners. Since then I've purchased well over 100 graphics cards for friends, relatives, and my own builds. Guess who made all that money from my purchases? ATI/AMD. Now Nvidia is deceiving their customers too? Glad I hopped off that bandwagon over 15 years ago.
You reap what you sow and Nvidia deserves what backlash they receive.

 

[littleleo]

Of course that was a totally unbiased view AMD-HTPC, lol. I've bought and sold both ATi/AMD and Nvidia and I've had problems with both. I've had driver issues with both. And I've had cards from both brands of chipset die on me. It just so happens a much higher percentage of the ATI/AMD cards I've purchased have had terrible driver issues or died on me then the NVidia models.

So despite the bad press and all the chest pumping by AMD fanboys I still feel better buying and selling Nvidia chipset cards. Yes I know they are more money but they just seem to work for me w/o all the drama I get every time I try a ATI/AMD card. I'm sure there are those with the exact opposite experience, and that is Ok. In the end your past experiences affect your buying patterns. 95% of my customers always buy Nvidia and I have to really push them to try AMD. They always come back to Nvida and shy away from the AMDs. I still got backorders for customers waiting for Titans for crying out loud.

The AMD rep was here and do you know what his sales pitch was? "Tell your customers, yes our drivers have been crap all these years but now our drivers are better and we're cheaper the Nvidia". That is a good selling point for you alright. Keep buying AMD AMD-HTPC I'm sure you and your buds are getting AMD closer and closer to the Green, I mean Black. We need AMD to survive to keep prices going down.

 

[littleleo]

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured?
No
Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate complaint?
No

The advertising about the amount of RAM was correct. BUT, on launch they released tech specs to reviewers stating that the card had 64 ROPs and 2MB L2 Cache... in fact it has only 56 ROPs and 1.75MB L2 Cache. Is that the end of the world? No. But it's not nothing!

So yes, their advertising was misleading. They published incorrect specs for the card that went uncorrected for 4 months and was only addressed once complaints about performance stated to gain traction.

I wholeheartedly agree that some of this rhetoric is overblown hype, but to dismiss it as nothing isn't fair either IMHO.

Good points

Exactly they had months to realize the mistake and never spoke up. That should have been address right away. They should at least throw a BAR-Q for all those that bought GTX 970s in addition to a refund.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Nvidia has always been a scumbag company. I purchased 1 Nvidia card in my lifetime the original Geforce 256 which was revolutionary at the time. Once 3Dfx bit the dust Nvidia picked their bones clean and offered virtually no tech support for 3Dfx owners. Since then I've purchased well over 100 graphics cards for friends, relatives, and my own builds. Guess who made all that money from my purchases? ATI/AMD. Now Nvidia is deceiving their customers too? Glad I hopped off that bandwagon over 15 years ago.
You reap what you sow and Nvidia deserves what backlash they receive.

Wow, I love how unbiased you are!

 

[AMDHTPC]

Did I claim it was unbiased? You bet your ass it's not. Many of you Nvidia fanboys have never heard of 3Dfx before. When that went down millions of people were basically sh*t on by Nvidia. I'm glad they stuck around to give some competition, but If it happened to you, I can guarantee you'd be biased too. I never had a problem with ATI/AMD drivers and have never had a card die on me either. Many times the problem lies not within the software, but with the operator. That being said, it's well known both of these companies have had their share of driver & software issues.
Those of us who haven't had many problems from either ATI/AMD or Nivida are in a small minority of computer users. Don't kid yourself, sometimes it's just luck.

The AMD rep was here and do you know what his sales pitch was? "Tell your customers, yes our drivers have been crap all these years but now our drivers are better and we're cheaper the Nvidia". That is a good selling point for you alright. Keep buying AMD AMD-HTPC I'm sure you and your buds are getting AMD closer and closer to the Green, I mean Black. We need AMD to survive to keep prices going down.

The AMD rep was never in your parent's basement, smells like bullsh*t to me.

 

[Kyle Severson]

What in the world is wrong with you people, you act as if all of a sudden benchmarks were wrong and you got screwed out of your money as if you bought a 9600gt video card masked as a gtx. Get real people, this is nothing to even be upset about, WOW that 512MB sure made a huge DIFFERENCE in your gaming didnt it!? NO it didnt.

 

[littleleo]

Did I claim it was unbiased? You bet your ass it's not. Many of you Nvidia fanboys have never heard of 3Dfx before. When that went down millions of people were basically sh*t on by Nvidia. I'm glad they stuck around to give some competition, but If it happened to you, I can guarantee you'd be biased too. I never had a problem with ATI/AMD drivers and have never had a card die on me either. Many times the problem lies not within the software, but with the operator. That being said, it's well known both of these companies have had their share of driver & software issues.
Those of us who haven't had many problems from either ATI/AMD or Nivida are in a small minority of computer users. Don't kid yourself, sometimes it's just luck.

The AMD rep was here and do you know what his sales pitch was? "Tell your customers, yes our drivers have been crap all these years but now our drivers are better and we're cheaper the Nvidia". That is a good selling point for you alright. Keep buying AMD AMD-HTPC I'm sure you and your buds are getting AMD closer and closer to the Green, I mean Black. We need AMD to survive to keep prices going down.

The AMD rep was never in your parent's basement, smells like bullsh*t to me.

Basement? You are so funny, sorry sunny I don't live in a basement or under a bridge like some people do. What I love about my job is I have top manufacturers coming to my company monthly telling us about the latest and greatest stuff they have going on. We have been treated to prizes, lunches and dinners from manufacturers. A mater of fact I'll be at the D&H show soon checking out all the new stuff picking up swag and having a blast. Its awesome they feed us and show us all the new stuff and there is all the goodies and the bar. If you ever get out of your parents basement, take the tin foil off your head and wipe off the mayonnaise and get a job maybe you can join us.

 

[littleleo]

Did I claim it was unbiased? You bet your ass it's not. Many of you Nvidia fanboys have never heard of 3Dfx before. When that went down millions of people were basically sh*t on by Nvidia. I'm glad they stuck around to give some competition, but If it happened to you, I can guarantee you'd be biased too. I never had a problem with ATI/AMD drivers and have never had a card die on me either. Many times the problem lies not within the software, but with the operator. That being said, it's well known both of these companies have had their share of driver & software issues.
Those of us who haven't had many problems from either ATI/AMD or Nivida are in a small minority of computer users. Don't kid yourself, sometimes it's just luck.

Yes, I've heard of 3dfx they were awesome in their day I don't remember gamers running joint VGA cards as successfully until they did it with the 3dfx cards. unfortunately they went under and Nvidia bought some of their intellectual property. Others could have bid on it or made arrangements to acquire some of it but didn't. I remember MATROX too when they had the hot graphics card. I remember when ATI made their own VGA cards before they copied the Nvidia model to just make cores and spun off their factory I think that became Sapphire. I remember when they copied Nvidia and went to a unified driver. Before it was a nightmare you had a different driver for each program you wanted to run for some ATI cards. I still have nightmares about that.

Yes, buying stuff and having stuff die, or have errors is luck, bad luck. I've just happen to have had more bad luck with ATI/AMD then Nivida. I have purchased both brands I've used ATI when it was ATI from Canada and when AMD purchased ATI and they became part of AMD. I've purchased and sold multiple models I also sold the professional version the Fire GL, which has been very good. I've sold more Quadro and Tessla cards then Fire GL but they are a good product. I admit due to my experiences with ATI/AMD for my own use I tend to lean toward Nvidia. I'm sure others may have had the opposite experience. But I think I'm more objective then you who has only bought 1 Nvidia card in your entire life. I least I've tried ATI/AMD muiltiple times and I'll probably try them again in the future. I have recommend ATI/AMD to customers trying to hit a specific price/performance they just seem to always be willing to pay more for Nvidia, and the majority of them tell me their experiences between the two brands mirror mine. Make no mistake I don't care if a customer buys an AMD/ATI or Nvidia card I get paid the same either way. I just want them to buy something, lol.

Oh I forgot to mention when the AMD cards where in hot demand for coin mining I loved it! The prices were climbing and if customers waited the price could increase from $5 to $20 in one day it was amazing. Bummer it ended, lol.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

What in the world is wrong with you people, you act as if all of a sudden benchmarks were wrong and you got screwed out of your money as if you bought a 9600gt video card masked as a gtx. Get real people, this is nothing to even be upset about, WOW that 512MB sure made a huge DIFFERENCE in your gaming didnt it!? NO it didnt.

Stop assuming everyone only does gaming. For people who do modeling this 512Mb is a huge deal.

 

[littleleo]

What in the world is wrong with you people, you act as if all of a sudden benchmarks were wrong and you got screwed out of your money as if you bought a 9600gt video card masked as a gtx. Get real people, this is nothing to even be upset about, WOW that 512MB sure made a huge DIFFERENCE in your gaming didnt it!? NO it didnt.

Stop assuming everyone only does gaming. For people who do modeling this 512Mb is a huge deal.

They should have gotten a QUADRO K2000 2GB DDR5 then.

 

[agello24]

drop the price of the 970 to $240 and i dont care what it does, ill buy one.

 

[Jimmy_DA]

once the first 3.5gb is fully utilised the remaining .5gb kicks in and a vast performance decrease as the first 3.5gb of RAM matches the slowest RAM module speed. 0

Umm, that's not how it works. Please read this for a detailed explanation:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

That was my point. But wanted to emphasise the fact that once the first (faster) 3.5GB VRAM block of memory is used and the remaining .5GB comes into play performance drops due to the slower .5GB VRAM segment.

 

[Jimmy_DA]

to those saying it has 4gb get over, yes it does but it's split RAM. The issue is the first 3.5gb of RAM runs at A speed and the other .5gb at B speed. Now A speed is faster than B speed which is the issue. Whenever there is more than one module of RAM utilise the memory architecture will always run it at the slowest modules speed. Herin lies the problem - once the first 3.5gb is fully utilised the remaining .5gb kicks in and a vast performance decrease as the first 3.5gb of RAM matches the slowest RAM module speed. This is what customers are complaing about, yes the specs/benchmarks are impressive but these are taking at optimal values (the deceit) whilst only utilising up to 3.5gb. There saying it has 4gb get over it is quite an unintelligent statement. As while true it does but if you are to utilise over 75% of its ram you will do so at a dramatically vast decrease in rendering performance. It's like a V12 with 2 blown cylinders - yes it's a V12 but it can only run at the capacity of a V10

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured?
No
Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate complaint?
No

Did the advertising ever mislead you as to how the RAM was configured? -> Um yes it was misleading, there was no mentioning in the advertising of the 4Gb of total VRAM being split into a 3.5Gb and a .5Gb segnment. Could you please point me to where it says this?

Did you read benchmarks before you bought the card and understood the performance you were going to get? -> Yes and no - refer to the statement given from http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-corr... (under the 3rd picture from article top)

"This in turn is why the 224GB/sec memory bandwidth number for the GTX 970 is technically correct and yet still not entirely useful as we move past the memory controllers, as it is not possible to actually get that much bandwidth at once when doing a pure read or a pure write. In the case of pure reads for example, GTX 970 can read the 3.5GB segment at 196GB/sec (7GHz * 7 ports * 32-bits), or it can read the 512MB segment at 28GB/sec, but it cannot read from both at once; it is a true XOR situation. The same is also true for writes, as only one segment can be written to at a time.

Unfortunately what this means is that accessing the weaker 512MB segment blocks access to the stronger 3.5GB segment if both memory operations are identical; or put another way, using the 512MB segment can harm the performance of the 3.5GB segment. For example, if we want to issue reads to both segments at once, reading the 512MB segment blocks any other reads to the 3.5GB segment for that cycle. If the 3.5GB segment is blocked in this fashion and doesn't have a non-blocking write to work on instead, it would have to go idle for that cycle, which would reduce the effective memory bandwidth of the 3.5GB segment. This means that taken over time in our example, the larger the percentage of the time the crossbar is reading the 512MB segment, the lower the effective read memory bandwidth would be from the 3.5GB segment."

Do you have a legitimate complaint? -> No - yes we do as the specs quoted the card as having 4Gb of VRAM running at a total bandwidth of 224GB/sec when in fact it is 196GB/sec for the 3.5Gb block and 28GB/sec for the .5Gb block. If you were to use over 3.5GB of VRAM it would not do so at 224GB/sec nor 196GB/sec. Again from the article - "...this is only applicable to situations where more than 3.5GB of VRAM is in use and both segments are necessary, this means it's only theoretically possible to achieve 224GB/sec when more than 3.5GB of VRAM is in use.... but due to the blocking effect we've discussed before the performance hit from using the 512MB segment can quickly become greater than any gains..."

 

[littleleo]

drop the price of the 970 to $240 and i dont care what it does, ill buy one.

Me too!

 

[druss300]

Did Brian Williams have a hand in this?

 

[littleleo]

No, Sara Palin

 

[Mugglensu1984]

Kiss my ass Jen-Hsun... Will hold out for AMD's R9 390X !

 

[Outlander_04]

Every nVidia card I have used died on the job . Every AMD card I have used was sold second hand after a couple of years and was still working fine .
Could just be coincidence , but I think its more likely that nVidia push their card to higher clocks knowing they will die sooner , but after an acceptable life .

But I buy on cost vs performance so nVidia could be the manufacturer of my next graphics card . or not .
Fortunately thats a decision I dont need to make till after the new radeons arrive .

I do still think the people who bought GTX 970's have no case . They bought cards of known performance , and the card does use all 4 gig of RAM

 

[littleleo]

Interesting how Tom's only lets you vote a certain way on these post I sure they aren't try to make you vote a certain way, right.