GTX 970 "4GB" graphics cards

Did I miss something... is NVIDIA still advertising the GTX 970 with 4GB of VRAM but actually it does not ??? Enlighten me...

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/compare-buy-gpus

Its still got 4gb's of memory on the card, even if 3.5gb's is high speed. Even functionally for non-gaming programs it has 4gb's. There are a good number of programs that can offload data to the gpu memory, and 4gb's are going to be used by these programs when needed.

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The last 512mb's is still faster then system memory, and thats important to consider when your talking about non-gaming programs because they can still use this memory and benefit from it.

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Ok, Well you see, the GTX970 uses a Cut down GM204 Core. The things cut include 384Cuda Cores, 24 less Texture units, and 8 less ROPs

Effectively, that's 3 SM's cut from 16.

BUT they also cut out a chunk of L2 cache, A chunk necessary for the full speed of the Memory controller and memory

Read Here

No memory was cut, The memory in question (.5GB) is strangled and crippled.

The last .5GB pool runs around at 1/7th the speed.

All 4GB of GDDR5 are there and it's not technically miss marketed. The only thing missleading where the ROP/TextureUnit/L2Cache press numbers.

The decrease in speed is not felt until you start to use that last 512MB. Nvidia has optimized their driver and some games to use that bit last. And even if it does use that last bit (you're trading usable FPS and Vram) it will put the least useful stuff there

Thanks guys I knew you would come through.

Super old news, lol.