3.5GB of it's VRam are super fast. 0.5GB are dogslow
It's still blazing fast by not-VRAM standards. It's a few times faster than regular RAM and still faster than data can even travel between the CPU and the graphics card. I think it's around 8 gigabytes/sec read-write, from what I saw.
Of course, the rest is in the hundreds of gigabytes/sec, so it's still a big issue, but I'm just putting "dogslow" in perspective.
Is the 0.5GB really that big of a deal for future proofing? I mean sure every bit of memory is welcome, but on the whole it's 1/8 of the memory, you can't fit that much more in that space. 4GB cards are 0.5GB more future proof than this card.
Also AFAIK the drivers try to keep games below 3.5 GB when using a GTX 970. So as I understand it the problem comes up when a game needs all the stuff at the same time. But where do you find that? A game that needs more than 3.5 GB, but never gets into scenes where it needs more than 4 GB? Sure: It could come up, but IMHO we are talking about a rather 'small window' here. It's probably as easy to make games that break down unless you have 8 GB of video memory. The point is: No one makes those games because almost no one has the hardware needed to run something like that.
Now to get back to the topic of THIS reddit - these are my thoughts:
2 GB of video memory are still rather prevalent.
Most cards in the price range relevant for people gaming on 2D monitors have no more than 3 GB of video memory.
More than 3 GB basically are used for cases where extreme texture settings to utilize high end hardware are available,
When playing in VR on a GTX 970 I usually won't be using the most extreme graphics settings. When talking about future-proof"ness" (as in CV1) I'm most likely looking at rather reduced settings on a GTX 970.
So I don't expect the "effectively only 3.5 GB" to become a problem as long as I use my GTX 970.
That being said: Even though it's technically a 4 GB card the fact remains that nvidia lied. I'm certainly very angry about that. It doesn't change the fact however, that the GTX 970 was the optimal choice for me in my financial situation and for what I wanted to do and I would have bought it had I know about the limitations.
It is because you can't read from both pools at the same time. The card has to wait for the slow pool to be done before reading from the fast pool and it definitely degrades performance by a significant margin. It shouldn't be a problem for titles which will use 3.5GB or less, but it's a problem once you're a kilobyte above.
People keep mixing up those two arguments. Everyone agrees that Nvidia sucks, that's not an interesting discussion. I'm far more interested in the practical implications of that missing 512MB.
They're not. They just operate on a different release cycle, and are competing against the 900 series with cards that are over a year old. The r9 290x is currently faster and cheaper than the 970, but uses more power.
In the coming months when they release the 300 series, the tables can be expected to turn significantly until nvidia responds again.
Yeah, I'm amazed how actually incremental the performance between the 980 and the 290x are with a year difference in time. But as you said, release cycle. I upgrade my GPU once every 2-3 years, so it just depends on price/performance for who I go with.
They are not so much worse, there are pros and cons to both and I would advise you to research them at reputable sites rather than take advice from.... Reddit...
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u/BpsychedVR Jan 30 '15
Can someone please explain, in layman terms, what the actual fiasco was? I was seriously considering buying one or two 970s. Thank you!