GTX 970 Memory Issues

[RonaldG]

I think NVIDIA really bungled the GTX 970 release with the memory issues. Basically what their engineers did was they lowered one of the cache sizes so that only 3.5GB of VRAM on the GTX 970 can be used at full speed. The other 0.5GB is limited by the lack of a cache for it. While this doesn't affect most current games that work at 1080p, the effect can be slightly noticeable when gaming at 4k, or when playing games that load extremely large textures.

Wonder what you guys think about this? Anyone returned their GTX 970 because of this?

 

[Cmok]

I've been following the issue since it has first arisen. It seems to me that Nvidia straight out lied and is now trying to cover up any way they can. Also not a lot of owners of GTX 970 seem to be aware of the issue, from what I've read only 5-10% of cards were returned. Of course the issue only becomes apparent if your gaming on very high resolutions (4k) that need more than 3.5GB VRAM, that's when the bandwidth drops significantly and so does performance.

 

[Squigly]

It's reasons like this that I feel that buying a middle-end graphics card is much better. Given how their price drops as newer GTX cards come out, and enough user reviews surface for you to find which cards are good, you can make an informed purchase for a graphics card that can perform decently well enough so long as you're not playing the latest games at highest graphics settings.