The Real Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Specifications

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molo9000

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So you're just going to leave it there and just believe Nvidia's claim that it's not an issue?

Do some benchmarks to see how the card performs when more than 3.5GB are utilized!

 

rdc85

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I'm reading more and more reviewer will test with FCAT about this issue.. it will out in a week or so..
(not easy task they said)..

then we will know if the effect big enough to effect game experience or can be neglected
 

joshul

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All the review sites are clearly partial to NVIDIA(i.e. supporting them in their lie). They are just saying no fault of nvidia in this and its ok to keep your card its a right thing to do.

The words used here in this article sounds exactly the same anandtech site used.

My trust on nvidia is already shaken and reading these BS from tom and anandtech makes me wonder if i should trust them anymore.
 

SessouXFX

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Spot on with that analogy, Don.

Anyone here saying they bought the 970 because it had 4 GB, needs to be plucked on the forehead with all the force of Thor swinging his Hammer. You'd figured the dopes bought the card for the awesome performance for cost of entry, first and foremost...
 
This really touches on one of the biggest issues of PC hardware today: It is now so advanced that the general public cannot distinguish it from magic. You can talk all day about rendering theory, and how one generations ROPs stack up against the next. GCN vs CUDA cores. Whatever. At the end of the day the tricks in the architecture to get these cards to do amazing things really does not matter. What matters is the performance that these cards provide under a given workload. Given that perspective, the 970 is still one of the top cards on the market. Yes, it would be better if the card was better... but that is why there are higher-end cards. The Titan lineup, the Quadro lineup, even the 980. Those are the no-compromise high-end cards, and the x70 series of cards have always been right on that boarder of the upper midrange offering a few compromises to dramatically lower the price while still offering lots of performance.

In other words the 970 is no hellcat. The 970 is what would happen if they took a hellcat engine and body style, but then paired it with a slightly less capable drive train. It does not shift gears quite as nice, and it does not make quite as much noise off the line, but it is still a nice car and costs 25% less than owning a 'real' hellcat.

If nVidia was optomising for benchmarks that end up not reflecting real-world performance (as happens in the mobile markets and browser markets) then there could be a case to be made at a cover-up. If they were paying people to boost reported GPU numbers in reviews then that would be an issue. But saying that a card has 2960 whose-its paired with 9064 whats-its and it comes out that it really only has 2600 whose-its paired with 8750 whats-its after the hard has already been through a lot of unbiased testing and reviewing is not a coverup, that is just standard practice marketing because the whose-its and whats-its are things that are not comparable to any other thing in the real world. What you CAN compare are benchmarks, and the benchmarks say that the card is good under most circumstances, but that the card chokes under heavy vRAM usage compared to it's bigger brother, and so people should make their purchases accordingly.
 

SessouXFX

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"In other words the 970 is no hellcat. The 970 is what would happen if they took a hellcat engine and body style, but then paired it with a slightly less capable drive train. It does not shift gears quite as nice, and it does not make quite as much noise off the line, but it is still a nice car and costs 25% less than owning a 'real' hellcat."

AKA: an SRT-8. No shame in that whatsoever.
 

LansJ

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I will actually have to disagree with the author in this case about the car metaphor as this new line of nvidia graphics technology is being advertised as being equipped for the ultra-demanding technologies of VR (Oculus), and if it's not performing well enough in that type of environment this "misunderstanding" can actually contribute to simulator sickness (which is far from the case in the not-quite-as-powerful-car metaphor). I have three generations of Oculus headgear.

Even disregarding that technology we still have games coming out such as The Witcher 3 which are more than capable of using VRAM up to the marketed limit, and if I'm not mistaken the new Ubisoft Assassin's Creed had an Ultra-Textures setting requiring 4GB of VRAM. Just a few examples, but I'm serious in saying that it does and it will matter - especially if people are buying these high-end graphics cards.
 

Sirme91

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On the other hand the performance IF the card ha changed albeit not att this very moment, the card is no longer a 4 GB 224 Gbps card, its a 3.5 GB 196 Gbps card with 512 MB at 32 Gbps buffer memory, thats slower Rhen the momory on a gt 640 gddr5 that has 40 Gbps, and while that night work fine now when the nextgen gamesstarys to seriusly come around and you try playing them att settings that is going to require more then 3.5gb activly and not passivly then the card is going to Tank, so your car analogy is faulty,and i cant belivie how all reviewers just buys into whatever excuse nvidia is giving you, when they ärr in full damage control mode, you said it yourself people are dumb, and hos would it look like IF the gtx 970 had been released with the 3.5 GB it could actually handle, when its main comepetitor a generation old at that as well namely the 290/x had 4 GB of Vram?,
 

StarBound

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While there is no denying that the 970 is a great card and even a great value for money card the problem still lies that we don't have the correct product and because of the technical mistake there will be issues down the line. Even AMD had to drop their 2billion (million?) transistor count on the bulldozer to the actual 1.2 that was incorrectly reported by PR.

Nvidia is going to either give a greatly reduced price upgrade option to all 970 owners for a 980 or dish out some free games.
 

Antennor

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I am furious! This is deliberate false advertising! Nvidia marketing department just wanted to claim it was a 4gb card. Nvidia knew all along, otherwise someone would have let all of these review sites know there was a mistake very early on. Nvidia you are scum for treating us like this! This was the first Nvidia card I have ever bought and it will be the last.YOU HERE ME NVIDIA!
 

greygoo

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I'm disappointed in tomshardware for justifying nvidia's anti consumer behaviour. Can I continue trusting a review site that sides with the hardware makers instead of representing us consumers?
 

Sirme91

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i see another issue brewing out of this one, anyone else noticed that almost every tech review site is bending over and taking nvidias side of the problem, i have yet too se ONE reviewer agree that the consumer should be mad and that nvidia is wrong, instead you get pieces like this, a keyword is conspiracies and he says its just human stupidity and greed but that argument can just as easily be turned around in favour for the "conspiracies" the use of that particular word is a ruler tactic to undermine the oppositions views and beliefs. the question about clean journalism comes to mind

so lets delve in some cinspiracies, you are supposed to protect the consumer not the corporations, or maybe they are sending you paychecks? little far fetched perhaps but what evidence is there beyond circumstensial well,

while other sites contiuneusley reported on this you weigh in when the problems been described and proved even from nvidia and then you say well stuff happened but its still the same card and i`m not suspicius at all at their story, i really belive their full retard damage control so all of you are probably wrong and if you dont belivie in nvidia you are probably just a conspiracy nut anyway,
i mean you the people who noticed this, And I Don who has not said a word on this over the last couple of weeksi am now weighing in and telling you it was an honest mistake because some higher up at nvidia tols me so,

Jesus we need fot the law to take a look at what the defintion for sites like this is, are they reviews for the consumer or ad spaces for the companys?
 

d_kuhn

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So pretty clearly Nvidia screwed up... and at some point in the future my (now) fast 970 might become a problem because of it. The first question I had was "why is it designed the way it is", the most logical reason I came up with was "a full bandwidth 970 was likely too close to the much more expensive 980 in performance".

The second question I had is "can Nvidia issue a patch to those of us that bought a full spec 970 to MAKE it full spec". If the answer to that is yes then maybe the bad press and pressure could be useful.
 

Lmah

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It's pretty huge when it's a product people are spending $300+ on and expecting to get years out of, while comparing it side by side to it's superior. It's a pretty huge error. Yes we knew how it performed when it released and it performed well, but now we know it will have a harder time holding up in future games due to it's memory limitation.

A lot of people should be disappointed in Nvidia, yes they are a great gpu manufacturer... But they can't have mistakes like this. I would be furious if I had a 970 that used 3.5gb of RAM of its 4gb. Some people buy the card simply for it's memory for games like Skyrim where more video ram is always better, if it was advertised at 3.5gb I'm pretty sure those people would have gotten a 290x over a GTX970.
 

Bamaboy

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It does make a difference because I was between the GTX 970 and R9 290X and ended up going with the GTX. But I would have gone R9 with this info prior to purchase.
 
I guess it's good for me then to have continued to wait before upgrading. This is pretty shameful on the part of Nvidia and there's simply no excuses here. How could they have NOT known about this from release? I find it hard to believe they *just* discovered this.

If anything, this incident gives up some ground to AMD and that's not what they need.
 

SessouXFX

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It's .5 GB short and it still gives the 980 a freaking run for it's money, and still arguably the best card on the market, FAT FREAKING PERIOD.

You can haggle over the schematics of "being lied to" about the missing .5GB all you want to, if anything else, this card being short .5 GB and still being able to perform the way it does, makes it even more appealing.

It was never meant to be a single card solution for 4k. if you bought it for that very reason, you cheated yourself. In fact, even if you bought 2 970's, you still have to deal with the lower refresh rates of a 4K monitor, so it's not as if you're being cheated out of 20-30FPS to reach 60 FRP. All cards are struggling to met the 4K demands at that level. The resolution that truly matters with the 970 is 1440. Can anyone say it's incapable of meeting the demands of handling games at 1440?

The flip side of all of this is, i think many have forgotten that the Maxwell isn't about pushing the kind of pixels many are clamoring for. That comes with the release of Pascal.

Maxwell was all about DX12 and energy efficiency, not pushing 4k to the Max. Everything else that was added was icing on the cake. We weren't expecting to see tech like DSR, for example.

 

The_Icon

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I still not sure how are you guys defending them? Yes, it doesn't make much difference in most situations, but IT DOES under certain situations. Not to mention I got this card based on specs, which read 4GB 224GB/S, it didn't mention anything but the two different pools of memory. Anyways, I'm very disappointed Toms Hardware.
 

flagoman

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I still feel betrayed, plain and simple.
But, Disabled?
So the Hardware is there then, and not accessible, Can we update the Firmware to let's say the same as a GTX 980? and that will enable the hardware, that actually is there? or am I to naive?
If I understood correctly, the hardware is physically there, but not accessible. Actually the remaining step for Nvidia, would be to update the firmware and awake the disabled hardware......
 

CorbNoir

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I find it more than a little disconcerting that a review site is essentially telling customers who may or may not have bought a product based on their recommendation that it's okay that they were lied to about that product.

Very disappointed in this non-response. It's out-of-the-box performance does not live up to what was advertised on the box, as long as that's a reality and it's continued to be priced based on its on-the-box specs how can you call it a good price/performance ratio with a straight face?
 

Gurg

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I have 2 970s in sli. When playing Empire TW (released 2009) at 1440 ultra and at fast or fastest speeds during intense battles I'm getting stuttering. It then doesn't stop even if I reduce the speed back to normal. Perhaps this is because it is still stuck in using the slower memory segment.

Need a TX product liability law firm to file a class action suit and negotiate new fully functioned replacement cards or full cash refunds for every purchaser.
 

Dee Lee

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Tell me how two high level Nvidia execs cash out a combined $1 Million in Dec/Jan. Then tell me again how Nvidia discovers they misrepresented their specs at the exact same time that people start reporting performance issues 6 months after the card has been released. I believe your razor is blunt.
 

childofthekorn

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So funny, there was so much anti-amd sentiment before this information was released and it looks like just overnight everyone turned anti-nvidia due to a mistake for one specific model. No wonder business ownership is on the decline. Gotta deal with everyone crying foul at every little detail when it doesn't affect performance much.
 
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