14 DAY TRIAL // If you've been keeping tabs on the graphics card market, you are probably familiar with the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card from NVIDIA and the latest woes surrounding it. Naturally, AMD could not just let the matter go by ignored.
For those new to this arguably overblown mess, it has come to light that the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card from NVIDIA can only use 3.5 GB of its 4 GB at full throttle.
0.5 GB are sectioned off because of the SMM arrangement, causing them to work more slowly. NVIDIA has only made it so that GTX 970 accesses it only when the other 3.5 GB are overtaxed.
Alas, then it came to light that NVIDIA had mistakenly provided false specifications for the board back in 2014.
Eventually, it was decided that the card would receive an update that would optimize memory use but that NVIDIA would accept it if owners want a refund or exchange for the GTX 970. Even though the card was still the best at its price, odd memory behavior or not.
Naturally, Advanced Micro Devices saw an opportunity
The Radeon R9 290X video board has been made cheaper than ever, its price going from $399 / €399 to $299 / €299.
Well, we're certain that its price has gone down in the United States of America. The EU shops may turn out a bit slower on the uptake.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company did not directly poke fun at NVIDIA, but it did rather blatantly slap the “4GB means 4GB” on the promo card shot.
It is interesting to note that the Radeon R9 290X can achieve a bandwidth of 320 GB/s, above what GTX 970 can accomplish, thanks to the 512-bit memory interface. Not that this prevented NVIDIA's card from winning benchmarks tests as soon as it came out.
It's also kind of ironic that AMD is prodding NVIDIA this way, considering that it has its own history with false specs. We only need to look at the Bulldozer architecture and how it eventually turned up that the processor had 1.2 billion transistors instead of 2 billion.
Then again, the Sunnyvale outfit did not say anything about NVIDIA having released a faulty reviewers guide (due to what is described as a misunderstanding), so it's still treading the line well enough.
For those who want a summary, a mix-up between the engineering team and the PR team at NVIDIA caused the spec sheet of GTX 970, back in 2014, to provide a wrong ROP count and cache. Curiously, this ended up not having anything to do with the memory peculiarities at all, since it boiled down to SMM instead, as we said before.
