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tal onzy

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By Julian Benson


More than a hundred GTX 970 owners are suing Nvidia, claiming that the graphics card manufacturer misled them in its advertising of the GTX 970.

They say that the card’s real specification has less VRAM, Raster Operating Pipelines and L2 cache space than Nvidia say in its adverts, and, despite admitting the card is not as powerful as they claim, they still advertise it as more powerful than it is.

If successful, the plaintiffs might win some of Nvidia $4.68 billion 2014 revenue.

The suit claims the GTX 970 graphics cards “were sold based on the misleading representation that the GTX 970 operates with a full 4GB of VRAM at GDDR5 (not a less performant 3.5 GB with a less performant and decoupled .5 GB spillover), 64 ROPs (as opposed to 56 ROPs), and an L2 cache capacity of 2048KB (as opposed to 1792 KB), or omitted material facts to the contrary.

“The Defendants engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers nationwide about the characteristics, qualities and benefits of the GTX 970 by stating that the GTX 970 provides a true 4GB of VRAM, 64 ROPs, and 2048 KB of L2 cache capacity, when in fact it does not.”

They also complain that despite Nvidia’s senior VP of GPU engineering, Jonah Alben,admitting the card doesn’t have 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, GTX 970 adverts still claim it has the full 4 GB.

The suit follows a petition to the European Commission and Federal Trade Commission to force Nvidia to provide refunds to any GTX 970 owner who wants one. It’s already picked up more than 9,000 signatures.

If successful, the plaintiffs are looking for a number of possible outcomes. They want to see if the court will give Nvidia an injunction, forcing them to change how they advertise the card; they’d also like the court to compel Nvidia to refund unhappy customers the price of the card; and they even bring up disgorgement (giving up profits illegally gained). The suit points out that 2014 was a great year for Nvidia, the company’s revenue grew by 13% to $4.68 billion. If the plaintiffs won they want the court to consider giving some of those profits to the plaintiffs.

While the suit has been filed, there’s no word yet on whether it will go to court.
 

tal onzy

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Nvidia apologise for GTX 970 memory debacle; "we won't let this happen again (Story by Nick Wilson)

Yesterday, we learned that over a hundred owners of new flagship GPU, the GTX 970, are suing Nvidia for “overstating the card’s performance”. The crux of the issue lies within the amount of RAM the card has: 4GB on the box, but in actual fact the additional 1GB is segmented in half. Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang has stepped up to offer an explanation, and to apologise for the confusion caused.

“This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning,” said Huang. “We’ll do a better job next time.”



First, Jen-Hsun Huang explains the reasoning behind the segmented RAM. “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.”

Whether it was “good design” or not, Huang admits that there was a breakdown in communication. “Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.” Huang said. “But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.”

Whether this will quell the 100+ customers who feel Nvidia misrepresented and advertised the GTX 970, remains to be seen.
 

boxmouth1

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"We won't let this happen again" lol wow
I love Nvidia cards mainly for the drivers but if they just lowered their prices people wouldn't be so quick to complain. I have a GTX 780 and a Radeon HD 7850 and when the 7850 is overclocked I get just about the same performance out of them. I think I paid somewhere around 500 for the Nvidia card and somewhere around 150 for the AMD and both were brand new.

If AMD's drivers didn't suck so horribly more people would probably buy them. The XFX cards are outstanding.
 
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