A the end of the day, the cards pref for most people wouldn't be too much different.
But thats not the problem.
The problem is how nvidia treated this situation. It seems with each day they're digging the 900 series further into the grave (shame for the 980, if it was a little better priced it'd be a pretty dam good card and still is either way).
I really hope the 300 series comes and kicks them in the ass to make them realize that we, as a community, don't acept this kind of behavior. They'll still be around after this obviously (no matter what fanboys say on other sites), but hopefully they learn their lesson.
Most of those I consider PR mistakes. The G92 series was really annoying because they kept saying it was a new and updated architecture with every year, when in reality it was the same chip underneath and performance gains were minimal.
The older stuff was just them releasing sub-par parts, saying they were highest tier, then a few months later going and releasing another "highest tier" to make up for it.
So Nvidia is claiming miscommunication between marketing and engineering. If that's the case then why didn't those specs get corrected within the first week of launch, why wasn't there an engineer that went "dufaq? Those specs aren't right, I should call someone and get that fixed" smells like 100% pure and organic ass-covering to me. Miscommunication or not the information that was sent out was wrong and no one tried to fix it until now, wait and only fix a problem when you get caught with your pants down, really? I hope Nvidia's stock plummets
Hopefully after my AMD black screening waiting for a driver fix.. hynix memory R9 290 and nvidia 3.5gb 970 my next card has no issues and bullshit associated with it.
Hopefully 970 owners will sell theirs in anger on eBay or there's a massive price drop so I can SLI :)
I don't understand why everyone is so surprised. Like I am pissed off at Nvidia as much as the next guy for their lack of transparency. But people are saying that they are annoyed because "the 970 doesn't perform as well as expected at higher resolutions". Its got a 256-bit bus. Its had the issue since day one and the results have shown that. Why are you getting bombed up about it now? Nothing has actually changed, it still performs as well as it did from day one, and on day one people were hailing this card as amazing value for money. People were saying Nvidia killed AMD with this card because of its amazing performance and that wasn't just coming from the fanboys either.
This card actually does an alright job, yes the price point should have come down by now, its been a couple of months, but its still competition for the 290X. I understand that people are ranting about Nvida's transparency but don't start bagging its performance. The difference that the VRAM issue makes is very very little. Honestly hammer them and boycott them for being secretive but don't hammer them for performance of the card, you should have done that at release if you wanted to. I'm not loyal to either AMD or Nvidia, we need to hit them for the right reasons otherwise they won't change.
Its a bit hard to word what I'm trying to say so I will use an analogy. We all hate Ubisoft because they are making shit games at the moment. If we all started saying "Asscreed Unity sucks stop making it", then they might stop making it and start making another shit franchise. Asscreed has been flogged but its not the concept that is bad, its the fact that Ubisoft is doing a shit job at making and polishing the games. If they made a decent Asscreed than people would be much more forgiving. (Note: We are actually giving Ubi the right message, but this is just an example of how we could do this wrong). We need to push Nvidia for transparency. I'd be much happier to buy a card if they said "yeah there is an issue with the last 0.5 gb of VRAM, here are some benchmarks that demonstrate that".
I'm still not going to get a card because I don't think its worth the price, I just want to make sure we push companies in the right way as a community.
Why do you care so much if people defend Nvidia, though? If they want to defend and purchase faulty products it's their business. You informed them and what they do with that information is on them. You just buy what you think is best and relax.
I currently have an Nvidia GTX 770 in my system, and it's been a pretty good card (aside from the power consumption and heat) but it only has 2GB of VRAM, which may be good for maybe another 1 to 2 years, however, I will probably be looking at going AMD for my next graphics card upgrade. I don't even own the GTX 970 but this whole situation has got me pretty irritated with Nvidia.
It shows that NVIDIA could get away with scummy tactics like these. Next thing you know, the next 1000 series (or whatever it's named) will also have the 3.5GB+0.5slow VRAM and they will try to sell it as a 4GB card, again and no one will bat an eye.
Doesnt the last 500mb get accessed only if it needs to as it would decrease general performance if it was in the primary memory pool? Im certainly no engineer and Im damn sure 99.9% of the flamers aren't either.
No-one seems to jump up and down when it comes to hdd or ssd capacity labeling. Or selling high speed ddr4 kits when one also needs a golden cpu to run such high spec ram. Or shit low end am3 boards with just a bios update so they can (and wont be able to handle) use 125w cpu's.
Marketing the world over is filled with lies and ambiguous product details.
970's are still quite good regardless of the issue.
Until there is an official explanation I'd hold off getting on the flame wagon.
It avoids accessing the last 500mb whenever possible since it leads to bandwidth problems. The more frequently that partition is access, the lower the overall bandwidth of the card is. This means that with some clever driver optimization, some parts of the VRAM that don't need to be frequently accessed can be put in the 500MB partition.
However, when that is not possible, either due to a lack of driver optimization (when surpassing 3.5 GB) or just needing more than 3.5GB for frequently accessed memory, games begin to stutter and generally perform very poorly.
There are also some reports of VRAM maxing out at 3.5GB and not using the secondary partition at all