^^ Few weeks back, a rumour started to brew up that GTX 970 has a serious memory allocation problem which is causing high-res gaming come to a halt. The amount of VRAM it was supposed to have, which is 4GB, is found to be suspiciously segmented to two partitions, one 3.5GB high speed/priority access for draw commands, and a rather low speed 0.5GB segment.
The air lit up with slew of allegations from sites and reviewers that these caused games to stutter like hell when those tried to utilise all 4GB of VRAM which nvidia promised the card would have at the time people bought it. If you look it up in web, you would find that GTX 970 is only able to fully utilize 3.5GB out of the 4GB of available VRAM optimally. While the card can still access all 4GB of VRAM, the last 0.5GB of memory is not accessed or managed as efficiently as the rest of the available memory. Which leads to the reported performance degradation when an application needs to access more than 3.5GB. But the reports pour in from sites soon and nvidia came up with a elaborated explnation of why and how it could affect games.
In real-world benchmarks from games, most users are not affected by the segmentation, and the performance hit that could occur if the same card would be pitted against a full 4GB GTX 980, is in 1-3% of drop margin. Meaning, in 1920*1080 or 1440P, you would barely notice anything, except you want to crank up details to insane levels in 4K or surround gaming. GTX 970 is not a card which would prove very useful in 4K gaming anyway, because cards with more VRAM is suggested to even get a playable FPS at those resolution.
Funny thing is , nobody was noticing any hiccups before the whole drama went online, there are notoriously rigged examples of the card stuttering while requiring 4GB of VRAM, at resolutions with games that SHOULD require at least 6GB of VRAM to start with to get at least 40+FPS, and SLI does not even change that. The whole fiasco about less performance is more like joke now.
Nvidia has addressed this, came clean and revised the specs of GTX 970 now as having 56 ROPs, 1.75MB of L2 Cache, and a memory bandwidth divided into 196 GB/s (3.5 GB)||28 GB/s (512MB).
Now the point, its totally justified that nvidia took a lot of heat because of their purportedly false advertising about the specs of GTX 970, had they not cleared the air out of what the offerings are from GTX 970 right now to owners and future buyers, they were bound to look at long list of lawsuits ready to burn their a$$ down. But the performance, yes the performance figures are saying otherwise, despite the spec revision, true configuration, the numbers did not change with games. GTX 970 is still performing brilliantly in all titles in full fidelity. Thats what still makes the card best VFM.
John Peddy research reported that the return rates of GTX 970 has been less than 5% all over the globe to big players in AIB. There are polls going on everywhere in which it is shown that 64% majority of people are directly saying that "specs dont matter but perf does" , 15% want to sit and let the dust settle down, 5-10 % accused nvidia of lying still keeping the card or was not owner in the first place.... and the rest returned thier cards.
So now, its about time YOU ask yourself a question. BTW , i am an owner of GTX 970, I dint play any games in last 5.2 months which exceeded 3.5 GB of VRAM, so it didnt matter to me, you can call that bias, but i seriously doubt that would make 970 any less of a champion card.
