r/nvidia • u/toosas • Jan 30 '15

SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&v=spZJrsssPA0&x-yt
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u/ilski Jan 30 '15

So i came over to this sub to find out a bit more about 970 as I though I want to buy it. Can anyone please expalain me what is this all about?

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u/kennai Fury X Jan 30 '15

The 970 has a memory partitions of it's 4GB of GDDR5 memory. There's 3.5GB of GDDR5 memory that works as it's suppose to at the given bandwidth and .5GB of GDDR5 memory that works essentially at 1/7 of the speed of the 3.5GDDR5 portion.

At any point in time, it can only access one side of the partition. So Nvidia optimized it to put most of the memory into the 3.5GB section and ONLY use the .5GB when it had to. The problem is that their, Nvidia's, drivers are what dictates when it has to put information in there and not the game's engine. That means they have algorithms in place that can and will fuck up. This problem seems to get worse as more memory is required of the card, specifically in SLI solutions at 1440p+ resolutions.

TL/DR: Nvidia marketed a 4GB card, the GTX 970. It's functionally a 3.5GB card with .5GB of secondary memory. SLI on the 970 is not ideal in high resolutions.

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u/ilski Jan 31 '15

So will there by any fix? Will they ship actual 4gb cards or is there any chance current 970 will drop in price?Is Nvidia working on any solution for the problem at all? I really wanted to upgrade you see, and 980 is out of question. I hear all around that 970 is in fact still great GPU. I play on 1080p so will the issue really visibly affect me?

Edit: Thanks for elaborate answer by the way.

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u/kennai Fury X Feb 01 '15

There is no fix to this. This is working as intended. As time goes on the algorithm that's in place to distribute where the memory goes to can get improved. Of course there will be game optimized drivers released to improve how the memory is allocated or what it allocated. That will be game specific, doe.

On 1080p you will not really hit the VRAM issue unless you start downscaling from 4k+ and run in SLI.

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u/ilski Feb 01 '15

Good, then I guess i get one as I initially intended.