Over the last few weeks we’ve all heard of the scandal relating to the 3.5GB VRAM buffer on the GTX 970 graphics cards. Yes, the card comes with 4GB, but the last 512mb is extremely slow compared to the rest. Well today, NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun, came forward to elaborate on this unfortunate turn of events.
“We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB. GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.
Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.”
So they tried to push the boundaries with as little as possible, resulting in a very fast and usable 3.5GB VRAM, but failed to tell anyone outside of the company of this groundbreaking memory architecture; something that could have played so well to their advantage has seemed to have backfired.
“The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience. This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning. We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.”
Good guys NVIDIA for admitting defeat, let’s hope future driver updates will increase the speed of the last 512mb.
Have you returned or received any form of refund for your GTX 970? Are you content with the performance and think this has been blown massively out of proportion by a small population? Let us know on Facebook and our Forums.
Thanks to NVIDIA for sharing this with us.
It was obvious from the beginning that they did it so that they could equip the 970 with more memory. Too bad they failed to present it the right way.
How are driver updates going to increase the crippled bus speeds? Its a physical limitation.
Is it worth returning though, the retailer I used are happy to accept a RMA but have said in their opinion they do not see it being an issue for the card, personally it depends how long you intend to keep the card, sooner or later a game will come out that will push the card to it’s limit resulting in the segmented 512 memory being used and causing performance issues. So it boils down to how long you plan to wait before upgrading again.
MWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
=D