GTX 970 VRAM (update: 900M GPUs not affected by 'ramgate')

Damn, Nvidia please just shut up:

Spoiler

Edit: BS all over their Twitter (now deleted)
https://twitter.com/nvidiageforce

 

Like you said before, The Nile is a long river...

SMH

 

Just... so very, very many things wrong with each tweet. I don't even...

 

Nvidia, plz stahp...

 

Lost in all this is the fact that Nvidia also canceled the supposed "driver fix" for the 970 memory issue.

Original statement:

Backtrack:

Predictably, Nvidia deleted all incriminating tweets from its Nvidia GeForce Twitter account.

But not before I caught this:

 

Addendum: All Nvidia deleted tweets still available on their mobile Twitter (as of this edit). Read and : http://imgur.com/a/aN6hm
Welp, time to recall the 970.

Nvidia,

 

You want to bet $100 that there will be a recall?

 

How about 100₫?

 

Right.
Because I dont think there isnt much one can do to get a recall unless resellers are willing to take the cost.

You have 4GB like advertised. It is 3.5GB + 0.5 but its still 4GB
The performance is still like reviews and Nvidia's own marketing slides show.

The recent reviews I posted earlier found and posted a couple pages back had very little if anything out of the ordinary across 4-5 games. If some games do have framerate issues, Nvidia can blame it on the drivers, which they may be able to tweak, and they can point to R9 290X which have inconsistency as well in a couple of games even though it still have one memory bank.

 

Please read and try to understand this post from a 970 SLI user: Check whether your card can use all of its VRAM

 

No it's not as advertised. The last 0.5GB is completely useless for gaming purposes (unless you enjoy deliberately inducing stuttering), so it's a 3.5GB card with 500MB of "cache" or whatever the hell nVidia wants to call it.

As for recall, yes that would be the right thing to do. Intel recalled their Cougar Point chipsets when they discovered the flaw with its SATA controller, and I guarantee a recall on that scale is at least 10x what nVidia would have to deal with.

(the fact that I'm using Intel of all companies as a positive example here just makes me SMH again)

Also, don't you find it a bit weird that most of the testing (at least 80%) done by users point to there being something off, while pretty much all the major US based hardware sites say the opposite? A couple of sites that jumped on AMD for the frame pacing issues have kept remarkably silent throughout this whole ordeal. Maybe the tinfoil hat has gotten the better of me, but it really does raise questions.

 

Sorry, I updated post to include OC clocks: Overclock of GPU limited by vBIOS to +135MHz to 1059MHz with boost to 1194MHz, vRAM at 6000MHz

With Prema's mod (still beta) I can go much higher, exceed stock 980m.

While I do agree FCAT doesn't really paint the full picture, I also realize that over 3.5GB is a rare occurrence. My 970m 3GB card so far hasn't run into any bottlenecks really, and there's no noticeable stutter whatsoever. It's rock solid. It seems in most cases ultra settings at 4k are required to exceed the 3.5GB threshold, which is not a realistic scenario for even a desktop 970.

If you want 4k gaming, get a 980 or 980 SLI. Bottom line is that this does not affect laptop GPU's, so not sure how this got so far anyhow.

 

Proof nVidia knew about the incorrect specs all along and did not just "mess up": https://forums.geforce.com/default/...formation-about-false-advertising-must-read-/

Someone please take a screenshot before that gets deleted

 

n=1, return your 970's or sell them, and buy 980's. Problem solved. I know it sucks, but sometimes to get what we want we have to take the good with the bad. That's what I'd do, if I was really as concerned as you are.

 

He already said that's not an option because he water cooled them.

 

So sell them... seriously. You can complain about it, and maybe it will get resolved after a lot of time, but if you want the performance, just get rid of them and buy 980's. Problem solved.

 

Right, and waste the additional several hundred dollars he spent on water cooling equipment...

Also, I doubt anyone would want 970's after this fiasco. Market value and demand for the 970 just fell off a cliff overnight. Probably could only flip them at a huge loss, what with AMD now selling 290X cards for retardedly low prices close to $200.

 

And you can't use that with the 980's? So it's better to complain about it incessantly and that doesn't resolve the issue? Either sell them or keep them and buy 980's, hoping nVidia will eventually refund the 970's, or just keep them understanding the potential "issue" that it has. Or even buy AMD, but wait, there's nothing really even remotely similar with AMD... we're stuck.

I don't like it either, but complaining about it incessantly doesn't help. Send it all to nVidia and give them the headache, not us. This is a laptop forum after all (so I'm told), and this is a desktop issue.

 

You mean...like the 290X?

 

HT you're right, I went overboard, and I'm sorry. As for my situation, trust me if I hadn't spent the $350 on watercooling these cards they'd be out my case by now, but sadly you can't use these waterblocks with the 980s.

In any case, this'll be my last post in this thread. Everything that needs to be said has been said, time to bring out the popcorn.

 

I'm not blaming you and I feel your pain, I've been down this road many times. In the end you either choose to fight "the man" or take your losses and move on. You could sell your water cooling and 970's or just keep them for the time being.

 

struggling with this new board system lol, still learning where to look for what..... sorry about your 970's n=1.

On a different note, let this not taint the 970m, I absolutely LOVE mine!

 

I feel for you, man. Getting back into desktops for the first time in a decade and you get this rotten luck.

 

same here. Love mine. Works great, cool, and can run at 980m speeds if needed.

 

Not really my point is if I was after a V8 and was sold a blown V6 I'd be annoyed. This is like being sold a V8 advertised as 350hp whereas it having an old tune installed on the ECU that limited it to 340hp that would only be noticed on a dyno or 1/4 mile which 90% would never do. Hardly reason to hand the whole car back.

I agree with your point, though I suspect you're in the <0.1% of buyers who thought that way when buying.

You have a case. Most of the rest vacillating on this issue do not. It is blown out of all proportion by these people by a benchmark done at desktop. AFAIK the desktop resources would be swapped out of VRAM when a game requests the space so the bench is not representative of real world use anyway. If it were serious, like 20% or something, or caused stuttering (like what you get out of the box on any Crossfire setup lol), then fair enough, however I've not seen any clear evidence (yet) that even forcing the unlikely state where the "fault" comes into play causes any noticeable effect. A few % of avg FPS (which I suspect is within the margin of error of anyone testing it thus far) does not convince me in the least.

Even when >3.5Gb is the avg fps still higher than the similarly priced Radeon?

The opposite analogy is someone on a forum here in Oz bought a 4cyl VW TSI but got a higher spec one (1.8L instead of 1.4L) which was only discovered when it grenaded in a way only the 1.8L does (known, if not officially admitted fault with the pistons). While they were car-clueless and had no idea while it worked, they have now suffered REAL detriment - the repair bill.

 

His laptop got all his luck. He bought a 60Hz 90% gamut AUO panel... which clocks to ~110Hz stable. His 4900MQ clocks to 4GHz on -50mV stable. His 2133MHz RAM clocks to 2400MHz without losing timings stable.

 

interesting article on the memory limitations of the 970: http://www.computerbase.de/2015-01/geforce-gtx-970-vram-speicher-benchmarks/

basically shows drastic performance decline in high res / high-quality texture scenarios when compared to the 980!

 

Interesting indeed. I still don't know how they plan on fixing this with a driver though.

 

They can't, it was another mistaken claim:

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...ost-geforce-gtx-970-performance-with-drivers/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2876...r-update-for-memory-performance-concerns.html

 

Check whether your card can use all of its VRAM

 

LOL

 

Now this made me laugh ha, thanks for sharing

 

Any updates from NVIDIA on the crap about the 347 drivers locking OCing on Maxwell mobile?

 

I`ve seen reports of both 970 having zero issues over 3.5GB and I`ve seen people complaining about stutters. The reason why I trust reviews from professional sites more is because they are testing cards under a controlled environment.
Users can use different settings across different cards, they use different hardware (CPU, RAM), different drivers, have tasks running in the background. And comparisons of screenshots, videos, etc from users become too hazy to figure out.

So I don`t know 100% sure on what side to believe. A growing number of reviews, which also use FCAT to plot down everything, found very little, so I feel more inclined to believe that side.
Now if it is an issue, Nvidia said they were working on a driver to tweak GTX 970 performance. Nvidia`s own engineer say that the GPU have access to both memory banks at the same time using 7th L2 on the crossbar shown in this picture.
So I think the tweaking involves using the 3.5GB bank more agressively and reading whats being actively used by the game and writing that on the faster 3.5GB portion and reading from there. While leaving the 0.5GB more as a cache like you say which it will fetch from if its needed by the game. Since the GPU does have a 4GB limit anyway, I think a very few games are actively using 4GB at all times, and it would meet a VRAM issue anyway if it cross the 4GB usage.

That is what I think will happen here, no matter what happens.
The GPU can still use 4GB VRAM. The performance is still there (according to reviews, both with FCAT and FPS data). That Nvidia choose to crosslink different memory banks like this isnt a valid concern to have a world wide recall in my eyes.
However, there is one thing that was untrue which I dont like, which may result to something, and that is that the GTX 970 have 56ROPs instead of the 64ROPs which they marketed the card as. ROPs is important with bandwidth intensive tasks, and I think there are quite a few that bought the card thinking they get as many ROPs as 980.
But who knows what will happen. The benchmarks still speak for themselves

 

I`ve seen reports of both 970 having zero issues over 3.5GB and I`ve seen people complaining about stutters. The reason why I trust reviews from professional sites more is because they are testing cards under a controlled environment.
Users can use different settings across different cards, they use different hardware (CPU, RAM), different drivers, have tasks running in the background. And comparisons of screenshots, videos, etc from users become too hazy to figure out.

So I don`t know 100% sure on what side to believe. A growing number of reviews, which also use FCAT to plot down everything, found very little, so I feel more inclined to believe that side.
Now if it is an issue, Nvidia said they were working on a driver to tweak GTX 970 performance. Nvidia`s own engineer say that the GPU have access to both memory banks at the same time using 7th L2 on the crossbar shown in this picture.
So I think the tweaking involves using the 3.5GB bank more agressively and reading whats being actively used by the game and writing that on the faster 3.5GB portion and reading from there. While leaving the 0.5GB more as a cache like you say which it will fetch from if its needed by the game. Since the GPU does have a 4GB limit anyway, I think a very few games are actively using 4GB at all times, and it would meet a VRAM issue anyway if it cross the 4GB usage.

That is what I think will happen here, no matter what happens.
The GPU can still use 4GB VRAM. The performance is still there (according to reviews, both with FCAT and FPS data). That Nvidia choose to crosslink different memory banks like this isnt a valid concern to have a world wide recall in my eyes.
However, there is one thing that was untrue which I dont like, which may result to something, and that is that the GTX 970 have 56ROPs instead of the 64ROPs which they marketed the card as. ROPs is important with bandwidth intensive tasks, and I think there are quite a few that bought the card thinking they get as many ROPs as 980.
But who knows what will happen. The benchmarks still speak for themselves and you would need a strong case to get a recall.

 

Nope, Cloudfire, it's still a real issue and many people are getting refunds. They retracted the driver fix statement.

 

I posted 3 different reviews testing 4-5 different games yesterday. Nobody saw anything fishy. Go back 3 pages or so to read them.

I also said some may get refunds earlier, but that is up to resellers to pay for. Nvidia doesnt approve of that, which is why Amazon - Newegg - MSI etc dont do refunds. I think EVGA is doing step ups for the people who bought that service for the 970 and have been nice and allowed some other ones to upgrade to 980. But that is most likely because they are being nice and building reputation.
Nvidia have retracted that the driver is specifically for GTX 970, but that wouldnt stop them from working on a driver anyway and just release it as a regular driver which happens to change memory usage for the 970

 

Nothing fishy? What do you mean?

Guru3D said they should have marketed it as a 3.5GB vRAM card and they found higher latency. They just said that they did not find anything as horrible as some users reported themselves.

"This already shows the different behavior of GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970, which had given the current debate kicked off. So is the GeForce GTX 980 is often the maximum available 4.0 gigabytes and then to start to delete unneeded data from the VRAM. The GeForce GTX 970 is doing something about it, however, seen to occupy more than 3.5 GB. The driver no longer deletes for this purpose once required data without the games are negatively affected.

Nvidia says that the last 512 MB will be released only by the driver when games they "really need".Nvidia indicates that the power loss is taking advantage of the last 512 MB compared to a non-limited GeForce GTX 970 between four and six percent, with a portion of the loss attributable also to the only 224 bits instead of 256-bit wide interface of the first 3.5 GB should be - that is always present, not only with more than 3.5 GB of memory." -- Computer Base

This means that it will differ from game to game, and area to area of whatever game.

The card straight up does not use >3.5GB unless absolutely necessary, and when it does, latency increases a small bit compared to the 980.

No one tested FC4 thoroughly in your 3 reports or AC Unity:

http://translate.google.ca/translat...gtx-970-vram-speicher-benchmarks/&prev=search

"At higher settings then changes the result. Because there show up in Assassin's Creed: Unity on the GeForce GTX 970 significantly worse results. Increase especially towards the end of the test sequence at the time intervals between frames, which can be felt in the game.

And also in Far Cry 4, there are more hangers with the small Maxwell accelerators draw attention to themselves by a stuttering in the game. The GeForce GTX 980 is not running perfectly, but is noticeably less vulnerable. In The Talo Principle then shows the mehrsekündige stop the GeForce GTX 970. From this apart are the results of the 3D accelerator very similar."

I am not sure if they are describing the graphs or the gameplay, but either way, I'd opt for a refund.

No doubt this issue would have been noticed in future games where VRAM is not allocated at 4GB, but 100% used at 4GB. Imagine 970 Tri-SLI latency times with DSR...

 

they describe both, with the talos principle showing a "break" in fps dropping to 0 for several seconds when using the 970. that doesnt happen with the 980...

 

So, wouldn't all the cards be broken then?

 

All desktop 970's, yes.

 

Wonder if my CPU is limiting my 970 enough that I don't notice it anyway?
I highly doubt that. But I also don't have a problem with my 970 that I can tell.

 

Think of the 970 as a 3.5GB instead of 4GB card. As long as your game doesn't require more than 3.5GB for playable performance, you should be good. It's a bigger issue for 970 SLI users because they have the raw horsepower to push up VRAM-intensive settings such as resolution and anti-aliasing, which is why they're more likely to run into that VRAM wall and experience microstuttering (which doesn't show up in an FPS readout).

 

Makes more sense.

I actually purchased my 970 because of the parity I'd have between on the go power and at home power. The two systems are fairly close, and I like to have consistent experiences.

 

Alright I lied, I'm posting in this thread again. Sue me no wait don't, sue nVidia instead.

This guy sums up the 970 vram issue better than I ever could. So if you're wondering what all the fuss is all about, that's what it's about.

Well actually for the ram I have to relax timings from 11-11-11 to 12-12-12 to do 2400. But yeah it's pretty one-sided.

 

This has noticeable stuttering. Wow... CPU load issues too.

 

If this advertising error is really just an advertising error, why hasn't the advertising error been addressed on their own website?

Shouldn't it look more like this?

 

At least the Italians are honest:

 

Laws in the EU are more pro-consumer.

 

I know, apparently returning the 970 for a refund in UK is also hordes easier.

If we here in the US are screwed, I'd at least like to see nVidia answer for this elsewhere.