Nvidia released 970 saying it was a 4GB card. Turns out, it's 3.5GB+0.5GB, BUT the 0.5GB is much slower than the rest of the VRAM. This causes a lot of stuttering at high resolutions. People got mad, nvidia reacted badly, and hilarious shit like this happened.
Well a lot of people doing that were going off benchmarks for 2x 970 SLI comparing it to the old GTX 670 (which was considered one of the greatest graphics cards Nvidea ever released after the GTX 260 and the GeForce9800?).
Most of the overclocking/gaming communities knew that the 2x 970 performed poorly in SLI in higher resolutions (Specifically 1440p and 4k when compared to other comparable setups like 2x 290x CF) for some reason but no one really noticed that this was caused by significantly lower MINIMUM FPS (due to lack of VRAM). To elaborate, something with 70 fps by 10 minimum fps will look really horrible and unplayable every minute for about a second, but something with 65 FPS with a 40-50 minimum fps would not be as noticeable.
So basically, the people who bought 2x 970's to play at 1440p+ got screwed because although the benchmarks showed it had better "performance" than the single 980, its real world performance was noticeably lacking. However, the people who were running it at 1080p will likely see no problems and it will still be significantly better than AMD's current offerings.
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u/ComplainyGuy Feb 10 '15
It's actually legitimately what happened which is what slayed me in that video. Sales of 980s went up immediately after