Tweet
When the GTX 970 launched last year, the tech press - Digital Foundry included - were unanimous in their praise for Nvidia's new hardware. Indeed, we called it "the GPU that nukes almost the entire high-end graphics card market from orbit". It beat the R9 290 and R9 290X, forcing AMD to instigate major price-cuts, while still providing the lion's share of the performance of the much more expensive GTX 980. But recent events have taken the sheen off this remarkable product. Nvidia released inaccurate specs to the press, resulting in a class action lawsuit for "deceptive conduct".Let's quickly recap what went wrong here. Nvidia's reviewers' guide painted a picture of the GTX 970 as a modestly cut-down version of its more expensive sibling, the GTX 980. It's based on the same architecture, uses the same GM204 silicon, but sees CUDA cores reduced from 2048 to 1664, while clock speeds are pared back from a maximum 1216MHz on the GTX 980 to 1178MHz on the cheaper card. Otherwise, it's the same tech - or so we were told. Anandtech's article goes into more depth on this, but other changes came to light some months later. The GTX 970 had 56 ROPs, not 64, while its L2 cache was 1.75MB, not 2MB.
However, the major issue concerns the onboard memory. The GTX 980 has 4GB of GDDR5 in one physical block, rated for 224GB/s. The GTX 970 has 3.5GB in one partition, operating at 196GB/s, with 512MB of much slower 28GB/s RAM in a second partition. Nvidia's driver automatically prioritises the faster RAM, only encroaching into the slower partition if it absolutely has to. And even then, the firm says that the driver intelligently allocates resources, only shunting low priority data into the slower area of RAM.
Read more…
More...