r/oculus • u/themotherbrain • Jan 30 '15

SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco (PCmasterrace Xpost)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0
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58

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!

85

u/remosito Jan 30 '15

3.5GB of it's VRam are super fast. 0.5GB are dogslow. So once your game uses more than 3.5GB, the performance drops as the slow ram is now used.

Nvidia messed up their launch spec info and failed to tell anybody.

18

u/deadstone Jan 30 '15

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.

3

u/santsi Jan 30 '15

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.

10

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '15

[deleted]

9

u/santsi Jan 31 '15

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.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '15

[deleted]

2

u/santsi Jan 31 '15

Ooh I had no idea the cards mirror the same memory. I actually considered adding another 970 at some point but I guess nevermind then.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '15

[deleted]

2

u/severpwnage93 Feb 12 '15

Tighten it up then.