A class action lawsuit has been filed by card owners

Feb 23, 2015 07:46 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA managed to dodge a big bullet when it caved to public pressure and restored overclocking capabilities to the GeForce GTX 970M mobile graphics processing units. A different matter is coming out to bite it though.

Some time before the problem with lack of clock tweaking on the laptop chip came out, it was discovered that the GeForce GTX 970 had a problem of its own.

More precisely, it has been uncovered that 3.5 GB of the memory work properly, but the remaining 500 MB are set up in such a way that they work slower and, worse, cause a drop in the whole card's performance when accessed.

This has caused quite a few people to say that the GTX 970 may as well have been named a 3.5 GB card instead of a 4 GB one.

Through it all, the GeForce GTX 970 remained the strongest video card at its price point of $329 / €329.

Nevertheless, quite a few people feel they have been lied to, so they have banded together and filed a class action lawsuit with the District Court for the Northern District of California.

The particulars of the lawsuit

Andrew Ostrowsky (and others in similar situation) vs. NVIDIA Corporation and GIGABYTE Global Business Corporation” is the title of the lawsuit.

The defendants are accused by over 100 class members of three counts of unfair, unlawful, and deceptive business practices, as well as misleading advertising. The controversy is said to have cost buyers of the board a combined $5 million / €4.4 million.

NVIDIA and co. misled buyers, among other things

This is one of the main sticking points of the lawsuit, and we can see why the plaintiffs are annoyed. While NVIDIA said it was all a misunderstanding, it's ultimately undeniable that customers have been buying the GTX 970 based on fake specs for months.

While initially the GeForce GTX 970 was said to have 64 ROPs and 4 GB of VRAM, it's been discovered more recently that the memory amount is actually 3.5 GB + 500 MB “spillover” and that the GPU only has 56 ROPs, as well as an L2 cache of 1.75 MB instead of 2 MB.