The company releases the final, official statement

Feb 25, 2015 07:26 GMT  ·  By

The GeForce GTX 970 graphics card from NVIDIA has been at the center of a rather fiery controversy since a certain discovery was made back in late January about the card running into problems when accessing more than 3.5 GB of VRAM.

There was a serious backlash afterwards, some of it justified and some of it blown out of proportion, but still more justified than many other so-called scandals we've had to cover in the past.

It wasn't just the way the memory worked that was the problem, but at some point it also came to light that the specs provided by NVIDIA to the world back in 2014 were wrong.

While most numbers on the specification sheet were on the spot, the number of ROPs was actually 56 instead of 64, and the cache was of 1.7 MB instead of 2 MB.

This didn't ultimately have much of a bearing on the performance though. The way memory was accessed did.

The so-called problem

Gamers have noticed that the graphics card works just fine as long as the game running doesn't try to access more than 3.5 GB.

Once the card attempts to use the remaining 500 MB, frame rates fall radically and performance becomes rather erratic in some titles.

After the initial explosion of outrage, the mistaken specifications of the GM204-300 GPU came to light as well, further fueling the scandal.

Company reps posted explanations and follow-ups on the NVIDIA forums throughout the ordeal, but now the company CEO has stepped forward to close the matter once and for all.

The explanation

On the chip diagram, there are two memory blocks attached to the last crossbar port, causing twice the normal amount of requests.

According to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Maxwell has a larger framebuffer than Kepler in order to allow for more than 3 GB VRAM. However, the additional 1 GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth.

The 512 MB segment that caused the uproar is meant to keep less frequently used data while the rest of the 3.5 GB do most of the work.

The CEO ends his open letter with a promise that this won't happen again and that NVIDIA will properly explain technical matters like this in the future. Though we did notice that the curious case of the erroneous ROP number and cache was not touched upon.

GTX 970 chip diagram
GTX 970 chip diagram
Jen-Hsun Huang's Open Letter

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
GTX 970 chip diagram
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