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After being accused of misleading consumers via false advertising regarding GeForce GTX 970, Nvidia has admitted wrongdoing. According to a blog post on the company’s website, President and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, fessed up.
As part of the statement, Huang said the company is aware that some consumers are upset about the description of the GeForce 970’s segmented memory not being clear when the product launched. Huang then went on to say the company understands how consumers feel and therefore, wants to provide information.
In the blog, Huang stated the architecture used to invent new memory is Maxwell. The goal was to make it possible for lower Maxwell configurations to have a larger frame buffer. As such, the GTX 970 would not be limited to just 3GB but instead, another 1GB could added.
The GTX 970 memory card has 4GB but as part of the extra 1GB is 512MB that is segmented and with lower bandwidth. Because another 1GB can be added to GTX 970 coupled with software engineers being able to maintain data less often used in the 512MB segment, this is a solid design.
What happened is that Nvidia made claims that the GeForce GTX 970 had 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM. However, what the company failed to disclose to consumers is that that memory is actually segmented opposed to being one large sum. In addition, with the upper 512MB running slower than the other memory, some games experience issues with performance.
While perhaps not intended to deceive consumers, not being completely truthful about how the GTX 970 memory works as resulted in a class-action lawsuit being filed. Huang finished his blog by saying that while the backlash against the company is understandable Nvidia never had intentions to falsify information to consumers, only provide the best GPU on the market.
