Nvidia settles US GeForce GTX 970 class action – $30 per buyer

[Cr@ig]

If i buy a new car with 4 wheels, i expect it to have 4 of equal widths. If i got one that was half in width making 3.5 wheels, then yes it would still drive but not the same, it would under perform that is a fact. Those people who want to keep there existing card but want to purchase and play at higher resolutions monitors may find that they will have to upgrade reluctantly there GFX card as well. Fortunately AMD RX480 4GB offers that at sub £200. Nvidia on the other hand sold a product with less than it should have been so pay up and move on.

[shaithis]

They absolutely did lie. On my msi 970 box it didn't disclose any of this bs. What other card has had different types of rams at different speeds? None. They advertised the card as having 4gb, being gddr5 and all of it running at 7 Gbps.

When does "Not disclosing" = Lying?

If that's the case EVERY PC product EVER sold has lied. It didn't tell me how many trasistors are in the box!! It didn't tell me it would run at 4x PCI-E in my motherboard! It didn't tell me exactly how it's inner workings were designed!

Go and read the definition of lying, then come back.

[EndlessWaves]

They absolutely did lie. On my msi 970 box it didn't disclose any of this bs. What other card has had different types of rams at different speeds? None.

There have been at least two other gaming cards of recent years with different bandwidth available to different parts of their memory.

But the engineering is irrelevent. It's the actual usage that matters. Did nVidia say something that implied the card was much stronger in some situations than it is in reality? Maybe for people doing compute work with the card but certainly not for gaming.

This has no more impact than the GTX 970's inferior DirectX 12 performance and nobody's claiming nVidia were incorrect in saying it supported DirectX 12.

[HalloweenJack]

As the owner of a 970SLI system, I can tell you this is a complete load of horsedung.

It is completely dependent on how the game engine utilises that slower memory, Battlefield 4 for example can go as high as 3.8GB on Vram usage at 4K resolution and will suffer no frame rate problems.

Only a small amount of games suffer, and even those that do generally only drop 10-20% of frames compared to when they keep below 3.5GB.

The impression given that frame rates collapse to unplayable levels is just one of those myths perpetuated by the internet rage monkeys like this guy.

as a previous owner of a GTX 970 I can happily tell you it IS true which is why mine went back and I got GTX 980 - initially in SLI as well , but since NV sli drivers were horrifically broken in windows 10 , the second GTX 980 also went back.

as for stutter mess - look at DOOM , GTA V etc you have to dial down the settings to get under 3.5GB then it works properly

[Bagpuss]

as for stutter mess - look at DOOM , GTA V etc you have to dial down the settings to get under 3.5GB then it works properly

Complete utter bull####.

GTA V is as smooth as silk when going over 3.5GB with my 970SLI setup.

Stop lying.

[jigger]

Nvidia lied about the specs of a card and if it was beneficial to have 500 meg of slower ram they would have A/ advertised it and B/ used this config on any of there other cards which they haven't.

They did not lie. The card had 4GB and performed as benchmarks showed.

Or are you really saying that all manufacturers should include detailed breakdowns of the internal workings of their cards that 99.99% of people wouldn't ever understand?

If Nvidia din't lie then it's pure stupidity. IMO Nvidia did lie and this is why they settled the case.

[Tabbykatze]

When does "Not disclosing" = Lying?

If that's the case EVERY PC product EVER sold has lied. It didn't tell me how many trasistors are in the box!! It didn't tell me it would run at 4x PCI-E in my motherboard! It didn't tell me exactly how it's inner workings were designed!

Go and read the definition of lying, then come back.

That's an incredibly naive/juvenile way of looking at this issue that Nvidia was responsible for.

Yes they didn't lie but at the same time they decided to conveniently not state the facts about their GPU and go ahead with "This GPU is running 4GB of GPU RAM and will operate with xyz at abc performance with 123 metrics". They misled there perceptions of the customer in the sense they perceived the notion of a fully operational 4GB of RAM operating at a specific GHz rate with this level of bandwidth. If I remember correctly they didn't add the "0.5GB of RAM running at a lower speed" publicly/up front to the layman until after they'd been found out. Additionally they put resellers in the firing line because unless a reseller is really switched on and they stated that the GTX970 ran with 4GB of RAM at a single bandwidth figure at purchase then the reseller has lied to the customer through no, or limited, fault of their own.

We can twist the definition of lying till the cows come home but it boils down to this:

Nvidia played their marketing spiel and people were quite correctly perceiving they were getting a 4GB RAM card with a specific bandwidth rate. There may have been footnotes and font size 2pt asterisks on that somewhere by Nvidia but it was generally accepted that they had either lied or misled the truth through their marketing of the card.

[jigger]

But they did lie, several times. For Nvidia too have not lied we have to assume every person involved with the GTX970 production and marketing is moron unable to communicate with other morons. Even the engineers that design and build Nvidia GPU's would have to be morons.

Was anyone sacked for the GTX 970 mess?

[HalloweenJack]

Complete utter bull####.

GTA V is as smooth as silk when going over 3.5GB with my 970SLI setup.

Stop lying.

so the ad hominem attack


prove me wrong.

[jigger]

When does "Not disclosing" = Lying?

If that's the case EVERY PC product EVER sold has lied. It didn't tell me how many trasistors are in the box!! It didn't tell me it would run at 4x PCI-E in my motherboard! It didn't tell me exactly how it's inner workings were designed!

Go and read the definition of lying, then come back.

When the intent is to deceive. Ie keep your mouth shut or we end up in trouble. Keep your mouth shut and we all make a fortune.

[jigger]

Anyone that bought one, after the news hit, shouldn't get a penny as the information was there if you bothered to look. Word of mouth etc. Other than that I doubt anyone had an issue, casual gaming, with the change of ram.

Another day, another excuse, a chance to get free cash.

Everybody that bought a GTX 970 should be compensated.

We shouldn't have to keep up with tech site or check to see if any ROP's or cache is missing from our GPU's. Nvidia lied again. Everything after that is Nvidia's and the now possibly retailers problems. The're the ones that kept knowingly selling the cards.

[jigger]

Anyone know if Ngreedia will extend this offer to European buyers ?

Or know if there is European class action lawsuits ongoing ?

I'm pretty sure within the EU it will be retailers that are responsible to protect customers. The EU will probably just fine Nvidia.

[Percy1983]

Why didn't more vote with there wallets like I did and get a 290x, as it is a few drivers later and it seems I had the better card all round.

[nobodyspecial]

$30 reflects the level of underperformance? That is assuming a linear relationship between performance and cost, when in reality, a law of diminishing returns apllies - an extra 10% performance is a lot more than an extra 10% cost when buying a new card!

Actually NV is getting screwed here, because nobody could find a game where it's performance in a review differed at all after you found out .5 GB was slower. Meaning NOTHING changed due to this knowledge. The card performs exactly as sold and reviewed. You have a nearly impossible task of showing where memory hits between 3.5-4GB without going OVER 4GB on both in an actual game. NV has done a very good "corner case" job of making it a moot point. They are getting hit here for advertising the wrong specs, not for perf. Show me a review where 970 took a hit that is abnormal vs. 980. Most sites found they dropped about the same with a diff of 1-3% depending on the game. For example:

https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Responds-GTX-970-35GB-Memory-Issue
1-3% difference tested over multiple games. Find a benchmark that shows worse for 970 vs. 980 please and I'm talking a GAME, not some synthetic crap to just point out it's different. At best you should get $10 for incorrectly stating the specs. Perf didn't change.

What exactly did you have as an OTHER option to buy? A 980 for how much more? ROFL. The only other choice beside 980 was to accept LESS perf by going AMD. Note also the .5GB that is slower is still 4x faster than system ram according to PCper. Please show where a GAME drops 10% on 970 vs. 980's drops while hitting <>3.5GB tested for both. What you will find is both get hit almost evenly due to the fact that you'll usually end up over 4GB on both. Also when frame times become an issue usually BOTH cards are already unplayable at under 30fps (who's playing 4K with a 970? Tough for a 1080ti to pull this off). IE they were running battlefield4 at an equivalent of 6K to punish frame times and then even the 980 was only avg 33fps...LOL. Unplayable mins.

You are also acting as though NV gets $350 on a $350 card...LOL. NV only makes the CHIP on that card. IIRC the price of the card was $329, not sure why they went with $350 here. So it is ridiculous to charge NV based on the entire price of the card, since they only make the CHIP in that cost. They are doing users a favor by not fighting this.

One more point, in EU, laws allowed a full refund/return. USA has far less stringent consumer protection laws, hence the USA penalty. If you had a problem in the EU with how this turned out, you just took it back for 100% of your money.

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/79925-nvidia-explains-geforce-gtx-970s-memory-problems/
"What do you, the gamers, make of Nvidia's initial reluctance to share how the GeForce GTX 970 really works? Or do you even care, because performance hasn't changed one iota from yesterday to today?"

EXACTLY. Who cares because perf hasn't change one IOTA. ROFL. Should they have gotten the specs correct upon release? YES. Did it change the benchmarks in reviews? NO. Nuff said.

[jigger]

You mean apart from the the fact Nvidia had pushed out a driver to stop the card using the slow portion GPU/memory. LOL Nvidia are doing users a favour by not fighting this. Nvidia have been fighting this since the out set.

[kompukare]

EXACTLY. Who cares because perf hasn't change one IOTA. ROFL. Should they have gotten the specs correct upon release? YES. Did it change the benchmarks in reviews? NO. Nuff said.

Well, it's by far not the first time Nvidia have been caught out not telling the truth or doing other underhand things.
Of course, the standard response on (especially American) forums seems to be 'all corporations do this, it's their duty to their shareholders, etc. etc.'
While not expecting moral behaviour from companies, if one company consistently behaves worse than others I will take that into account when making purchases or giving buying advice. A company run like that is far more likely to behave badly when confronted with a truly big problem. The way Nvidia reacted (or didn't) to selling millions of parts with defective solder back in the 8800GT era fits this pattern, and in hindsight I am no longer surprised about how they reacted.
What I am surprised is, that the $250 million settlement and continuing fallout did not change their corporate ethics. Somehow doubt the payout from this (US-only) class action will either, but while I believe the regulatory authorities should be the ones imposing fines this is still better than nothing.
Oh, yes, 'capacitor plague' (Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague) shows that if they can get away with it, most company will continue to screw over their customers so they can save a few pennies. The badcaps website is still full of quite recent TVs where big names saved a few pennies on their expensive TVs with lots of subsequent failures.