14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTX 970 graphics card looks great on paper, with its Maxwell GPU, price of $300 / €300 and 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, but some of the people who own the board have discovered something worrying.
More precisely, they have found that the board is incapable of using all its four GB of GDDR5 VRAM memory, much to their chagrin.
This gimped VRAM performance has left more than one owner at varying stages between quasi-impassive bemusement and the kind of emotional response that often results in gamers ragequitting some title or other.
To be fair, though, we understand their stance. Given their findings, it really does look like they paid a lot of money for something faulty.
The problem with the GeForce GTX 970
The VRAM bandwidth trips on its own feet if you try to push the video card to use more than 3-3.5 GB of the available RAM. In other words, the frame rate takes a huge hit when that happens.
“Just can't get more than 3540MB in Lords of the Fallen at any settings. After that i get performance hit, cause one of my GPUs usage drops by 20%,” one user states.
The Nai benchmark was used to discover why some aberrant behavior like this occurred, and it seems more and more likely that the hardware is to blame, not the driver.
This may be owed to the type of memory chips
This issue may only be affecting graphics cards which use VRAM chips from Hynix, according to a different user. The GPU-Z application can show you the memory manufacturer, or you can use the Nvidia Inspector v 1.9.7.3 tool.
Given how many different OEMs NVIDIA has, it's hard to say which boards use Hynix RAM and which still use Samsung or chips from some other supplier.
Meanwhile, we can only sit back and watch the drama unfold. At least we do have one piece of good news: NVIDIA knows about the problem and is looking into it. As it stands, NVIDIA said they were looking into the matter.
“We are still looking into this and will have an update as soon as possible,” NVIDIA Rep. ManuelG wrote.
In case you were worried, this issue has not been discovered on the GeForce GTX 980, so you can relax if that's the product you have or intend to buy.
