It seems like nVidia deliberately or mistakenly misrepresented the GTX 970. There's a lengthy technical explanation on Anandtech, but basically it's effectively only a 3.5GB card with a weaker/slower memory subsystem than the 980. The remaining 512mb is actually there in another partition, but it runs too slow to be of much use. That may explain why the 980 performs significantly better in VRAM intensive games, like Shadow of Mordor. Combine that with the 960 only having 2GB VRAM and nVidia really seems to be shafting its customers in the VRAM department these days. This is basically planned obsolescence. They could give us 8GB cards right now that could comfortably get someone through this generation of games, but that would mean selling fewer cards. They'd rather sell us overpriced, gimped cards that will need to be replaced in a year. I guess they don't want a repeat of what happened last generation where people bought Geforce 8800 cards and hung onto them for four or five years because they were so much more powerful than the consoles.
Since the Mavericks version of OS X was released, it's much easier to use standard PC GPUs in older desktop Mac Pros and I had been looking at all the various GTX variations as an upgrade for my system. One of the confusing aspects was that people were saying that the GTX 760 with 4GB didn't actually perform any better than the 2GB version. I also recently looked at the 970.
The 970 is still a good card for the money but this is a huge mistake by nVidia, I imagine the lawsuit happy Americans will be all over this. This it seems is a design feature of Maxwell, to be able to disable parts of a single ROP/L2 Partition and I expect we will see more of it in the future as it increases yield. It is just a shame that somehow it ended up being missed or misrepresented when the card specs were put to press. Still the benchmark scores for the 970 are still good.
It's not a gaming centered purchase, so I could probably live with the shortcomings of the 970, as it's still a big upgrade over my current 2009 GPU. It's kind of weird that the GTX 760 is so similar in price as well...that's primarily why I started looking at the 970 since the performance difference was easily worth an additional $10 - $20.
Well performance trumps all right? We can argue that they were misleading with their hardware numbers but the results have always been consistent. I'd say what AMD did with the 290s was a lot more offensive. The demo cards they sent out for review had fans that ran faster than stock and the benchmarks were slightly higher on those cards because thermal throttling was lower. Companies like Anandtech found that the retail cards they purchased were slower than the review models they got directly from AMD. Eventually AMD fixed fan speeds in all cards with driver updates but the initial benchmarks weren't "honest". Nvidia didn't lie about the quantity of memory and we don't really know how memory is supposed to be used in their cards anyway. There isn't a memory bible that manufactures must follow. I'm sure this will hurt there rep a little but I don't see anything they have done here as being truly unethical.
You should wait for the new AMD R9 300 cards coming out next month. They'll be using HBM memory which should blow DDR5 out of the water.
Who even knows. AMD has a long track record at this point of overpromising and underdelivering. If R9 300 were really that impressive, I think we would have seen the rumored 8GB versions of the 970 and 980. But that hasn't happened, so I'm guessing nVidia knows something we don't.
I'm guessing the R9 300 would be at least as pricey as the 980 GTX. The $350 dollar range is the more likely option for me.
Enter the nVidia Titan II (GM200)! Totally unofficial of course and I suspect quantities will be very limited. Nvidia will keep the crown but their main line-up will be slower than the R9 300s until they get their refresh. The Figi is the 380X. Of course AMD still has the 390X up their sleeve but that might not come until the end of the year.
Yeah I don't really see myself upgrading from my Strix 980, especially considering how cool and quiet it runs.
So Nvidia now has a class action lawsuit to deal with. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887234/nvidia-hit-with-false-advertising-suit-over-gtx-970-performance.html
Nvidia has settled the lawsuit. They estimated that .5GB of memory was worth $30. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit...graphics-card-false-advertising-class-action/