Isn't everyone shouting 970 the best price over performance? Never before happened?

Well now we know why it is cheap.

Regarding MSI Kombustor Memory Burner testing, is it reliable? My 7950 get 12-ish fps when i use 3GB test but 90-ish fps with 2GB test.

Well, someone managed to chat with nVidia's support....

Meanwhile at Nvidia (a chat from a forum user):

[10:11:39 PM] NV Chat: We have our entire team working on this issue with a high priority. This will soon be fixed for sure.
[10:11:54 PM] Me: So, what is the issue?
[10:12:07 PM] Me: What needs to be fixed?
[10:12:46 PM] NV Chat: We are not sure on that. We are still yet to find the cause of this issue.
[10:12:50 PM] NV Chat: Our team is working on it.


Either this boils down to:

1. Drivers
2. VBIOS
3. GPU hardware itself

If the drivers and the VBIOS are to be blamed, then this is probably a small issue, since they can always update the drivers and the VBIOS. If the GPU itself is the culprit, well....

Well, I'm definitely one of them. Still think it's working perfectly for me though. Am able to max out everything thrown at it. Not a multi-mon or 4k gamer here. So, perhaps this ram-gate thingy doesn't apply to me.

The problem is the principle itself...

Why would they label their 970s as a 4GB card when it can access 3.5GB of them without ending up in massive drops in memory bandwidth?

Yeah... true... more like false advertising or just plain CON job. Then again, I'm not complaining at the moment.

Don't worry. nVidia will flash your GTX970 bios to enable all SMM. Your GTX970 will become GTX980.

Pay for GTX970. Get GTX980.

This post has been edited by gogo2: Jan 26 2015, 12:20 PM

Well, bloody hell... if that's true... then thanks in advance. heh~

I think it will. You know many US people wanna sue nVidia. nVidia will crap out and send out a new firmware to enable all GTX980 feature in GTX970.

Great! Am gonna start a party real soon for this. Let see, who should be in the list...

if that happens i go quick buy another one haha , but yeah a bios update would be nice.

Not really reliable, but it's a general idea. The Nai benchmark is also bugged, so all the testing that was done in the last week was wrong too.

I still think the best way to test VRAM (for now) is to use Shadow of Mordor or Skyrim at 4k downsampling with 8k texture mods.


Best case scenario, lol!

If Nai benchmark is bugged, then why GTX980 doesn't have the gimped memory bandwidth problem?

That's because the 980 has more SMM than the 970. The 980 will always have a higher memory bandwidth, with or without the VRAM issue on the 970. The reason why it is bugged is that because Nai's benchmark only uses up to 3GB of VRAM effectively, not 3.5.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Jan 26 2015, 05:14 PM

I think the best way to check is to run some games that pushes to 4GB VRAM and check for stutters compared to GTX 980.

FPS data means nothing because the stutters happened fast but the average framerate aren't affected that much. But the same stutter hampers gameplay.

If they do this, then GTX980 owners gonna sue them.....

NVidia can release a firmware to flash gtx 980 to 970... ohwai....

Or even a free trade-in to a possible GTX980Ti..

Ai yo yo, you two ar...... Trolling mode ar....

Don't forgot SMM unit connection may be disabled by laser cut.

Impossible. You can't cut a feature using laser. That is so ridiculous.