The GTX 970 worked fine for nearly everyone who bought it. It is just as good as any other GPU in terms of whether it's working or it's not working. The problem is they totally did not report how the memory setup was, and may have straight up lied about it. That's inexcusable as a business practice and there should have been a class action.
But it's still a great card and works fantastic in every game I've thrown at it. Anyone who says it's a bad card is full of crap.
Don't let the fear mongering get you.
For this driver thing...if there is a drive released that is fucked up...you don't have to install it. GFE doesn't force you to update drivers, and as far as I can tell it's not going to with this change. It's just changing the way you get the updates.
Even if they did go that route... What is nVidia trying to do? Give you the best experience with their product. It is in their best interest as a company to not fuck it up. Because then they will lose market share. It's really that simple. I can't tell you how many times in the wild I have found YEARS OLD drivers and software that need to be updated.
Or mess with people's experience. Nvidia didn't have to do any of this. No one was complaining about installing drivers from the start. so why change it? Don't fix what's not broken.. as for market share and all that politcal stuff. people clearly don't care if Nvidia messes up. they are still going to buy it. the non-sense surviving Maxwell was an absolute mess, even worse then Fermi.. and people are still buying it.. 970 had issues, Gameworks killed everything that wasn't maxwell, G-Sync versus Mobile G-Sync nonsense. the list goes on. but people are still buying 970s, 980s and 960s as if none of it happened.
there's alot of questions that need answers. could they stop support for older cards? what if they say oh we don't want to support the 400 or 500 series anymore and cut drivers completely for those architectures? I don't see anything good coming from this.
I figured it out...
Nvidia is trying to impress Apple with it's walled garden mentality, so Apple will ditch AMD's and start using Nvidia's GPUs...
I don't see any other reason for all those proprietary software solutions for issues that don't exist...
But Nvidia charges too much for their GPUs so apple can make a lot more money by going with an AMD solution
extract the driver update into something thing people can install without geforce exp
make website full of ads to host said file
??????
profit.
Okay. Well this probably won't bother most nvidia users. I actually enjoy getting a message from GFE that there is a new driver update instead of having to look on their website to find it. As far as their other features go with GFE I don't use them if I don't want them. So don't act like its some evil piece of software from nvidia that ruins PC gaming. As far as I remember AMD has their own version that I actually found much for intrusive on my PC.
But I guess this is just another "hey look what nvidia did! Let's all act like they suck cause we are trolls! Thread.
I think the bigger issue people may have with it is the data collection, but ya Raptr is pretty bad and I don't know of anyone who uses even a 1/4th of it's features, but I don't think you need an account to use it.
I have to agree here... I used raptr for awhile... Now I don't... It's streaming didn't work properly, so I just set OBS and I was done...
The topic in my mind is not look what bad thing Nvidia has done... It's more like Look what bad things Nvidia could do with this thing they just did...
It will not effect Linux users unless they give the program Root access which it should not have, it's should be a non-issue on Linux, besides Nvidia has never had a great love for Linux so they will just act like it's a stepchild in the room and ignore it like always.
You are wrong here. Maybe you, me and this forum were not complaining about it; but the fact of the matter is that MANY HUNDREDS of computers I've fixed/repaired/ect over the past 5 years have NOT had the latest drivers on them or the latest versions of things like Firefox. Do you know what I do with these computers? I install Chrome. It updates automatically, and I can't think of any MAJOR issues or headaches it has caused me or my clients.
One thing that Chrome did do, which did cause me a slight headache, was that it disabled java (which you can turn back on by re-enabling NPAPI); but that's not Chrome's fault but rather it's because Oracle never got their shit together and started using auto-updates as well. It meant that they kept a product out in the wild that opened serious security flaws on peoples machines, because the people USING JAVA did not update their java clients, even though a messagepopped up EVERY DAMN TIME they sat at their computers. This is the very same reason Microsoft is doing the same with Windows 10. As someone in IT; It makes sense. Normal people don't click update; they click bother me later. and Never come back later to do it.
You are right when you say don't fix what's not broken. But this IS something thats broken. Regular people don't update their shit. Now that's not to say that your 5 year old Geforce drivers are going to have the same security implications as you using Java 6 and Firefox 2, but the fact of the matter is that IF and i stress IF nVidia went down that route it would NOT be a bad thing. But that is NOT what they are doing here in this announcement, they are just pushing out updates in GFE instead of on their website, which I still don't think is a bad idea. You dont HAVE to use GFE for anything else, but I don't see why you wouldn't just keep it running, its not really a big deal. Alot of you on this forum make bigger deals out of things than they are. I think all of you must come to the conclusion that sometimes it is what it is
Next point
The "nonsense" surrounding Maxwell isn't really a big deal. Yes, you are right they are all very bad decisions from the company. But Fermi was much worse. They lied about the card, it came out too hot to run, to big to manufacture, and cost way too much money. It was a horrible product. This is an exampe of a product we should ACTUALLY get upset about; and thats why I voted with my dollars and bought a 5850 at the time. So meanwhile at AMD the 5800 series was in a much better place, with similar performance for much cheaper and much more energy and thermally efficient. Does anyone else remember this hysterical commercial?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkyfGJgcwQ?
Anyway back to your point:
- The GTX 970 is a fantastic card. I have one, and I have deployed two
other GTX 970s to clients of mine. The card works great, overclocks
through the roof and literally matches 980 level performance if you
BIOS mod it, and costs $289 compared to the $519 of a GTX 980. How
are you going to sit there and tell me that it's a bad card? Yes
there was a marketing debacle. Yes they probably purposely withheld
the data about the memory bus. Someone should start a class action.
But it doesn't even matter because the card rocks. - Hairworks. nVidia has done stuff like this before. Remember PhysX? Well how many of you have a PhysX card now? Probably 0. So why on earth do you care about watching Geralt's chest hair so much that you are immensely pissed off about Hairworks? Again; it doesn't even matter.
- G-Sync, Mobile G-Sync, ect. If you care so much about this than buy an AMD card right now. nVidia is NOTORIOUS for doing stuff like this, but eventually the market will force their hand. I will use the PhysX example again. nVidia spent something like $150 million dollars to buy Aegia. But since then, they haven't been going around selling people PPUs. They were touted to be the next sound card or graphics card. Instead, the role of the PPU is back where it belongs, somewhere in software running on either the CPU or the GPU. The same thing is eventually going to happen with G-Sync, and I would bet money on that. They aren't going to capitulate and just adopt FreeSync, but they will use some variant of Mobile G-Sync and get rid of the G-sync controller requirement in the future. It's not because they WANT to but because GSync has caused too much confusion in the market, and because people like you and I who understand the technology have refused to buy into their bullshit ecosystem.
AMD and nVidia have BOTH been doing that EXACT SAME THING for years.
AMD doesn't support anything older than the HD 5000 series.
nVidia doesn't support anything older than the GTX 400 series.
What happened to all those users that had the older generation hardware? I had an HD 4670. It still works! You just use the legacy drivers for your legacy hardware. Once again; IT IS WHAT IT IS. It's nothing to get your panties in a bunch about. Why are we all making such a huge deal about all of these things?
Thank goodness someone who speaks common sense! It's like a breath of fresh air. I'm so sick of all this AMD vs Nvidia bullcrap!!
I'm actually wondering how this GFE thing is going to play with win 10....
Does this mean I could use GFE to roll back my drivers like I could on win7, 8 and 8.1??
I don't update anything unless something breaks because I just need my PC/software to werk.
im pissed.
on the other hand happy to see streaming is being improved as i just bought a laptop for streaming.
i'm torn. i like the features but they are complete dickholes about it. still prefer AMD
Well that question through a wrench into my sprocket.
good question.
Why are people making it a big deal? Because it IS a big deal.
Nvidia lied and tried throwing it under the bus till they got caught. 970 is a nice card but the VRAM issue is an absolute big deal. There's people that bought it for that very reason. To an extent it's almost false advertising really. Yeah it'a s 4GiBs. Just 3/4s of it is fast memory and the last 1/4 is slow. The way games are getting if you dont think that games will take advantage of more memory, you are seriously indenial. On a sidenote, be realistic not everyone is going to BiOS mod the 970 so stop it. It's a good card. But the fact that issue exists is still a problem. Whether you like it or not..
As for hairworks last i checked not even TressFX shitted on Nvidia cards the way Hairworks does to AMD cards.. In fact TressFX is a non issue. The feature is open source. Nvidia could do what they please with it. Also we've already seen Gameworks shit even on Kepler, it's the main reason none of the gameworks titles have done well and have taken backlash from the PC gaming community. It makes everything that is not maxwell look bad.
When i was referring to cutting off support, i was referring them possibly doing that to Fermi and or Kepler. If no one upgraded, they wouldn't make money, i'm sure something like that has cross the mind of the people at Nvidia.. They have shown no compassion for the user as of late anyways..
Also as for Nvidia requring your email for driver updates, why do they need that? No one should have to give up an email to install a driver..
This is rather annoying. I have a 50GB cap shared between 6 people. I don't have the internet connection to download drivers for that many computers. I usually leach off a friends internet to download the 300MB update and then offline install on other computers.
If I were to set up a new machine, I would have to download the 300MB quarterly update, then download another 300MB update once GeForce Experience is installed. Then lets say that they release a new update a day or two after, that is another 300MB totalling ~900MB.
This is extremely annoying when they release updates every 2 weeks that do very little except small optimizations for a new game release. If they were to switch to delta updates, then I might be a bit forgiving about the whole thing.
You don't have a problem with it because your choice is the same as their choice for you. What about those who now do not have a choice and are forced to do things the Nvidia way?
No one can have their cake in peace anymore, that's the overall moral of this fiasco.. Which i don't know if it is a fiasco yet, but i'm sure it will definitely be one very soon.
I don't know what to say about this... Seriously? I have to give my email just to download the latest driver??