In September of last year, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 was revealed and caught the eye of gamers everywhere. It was boasted to have a lot of bang for its buck with 4GB of VRAM at a $330 price.
Unfortunately, when gamers attempted to use more than 3.5GB of the cards 4GB of VRAM things got messy. Specifically speaking, the GTX 970 faltered at anything upwards of 3.5GB.
With all of the complaints rolling in, Nvidia couldn't stay mum for long – addressing the complaints revealed that the communities feedback was well-founded. The GTX 970's original specs were wrong and the way that Nvidia designed the memory was not optimal for performance.
When it comes to specs (and this is more technical than anything) the GTX 970 shipped with less render outputs (the thing that helps the card's performance) than was originally claimed. It was reported to have 64, but shipped with 56 render outputs. It also has a smaller L2 Cache with 1.75MB instead of 2MB. As for the memory , the card works on 3.5GB as the primary VRAM and uses the remaining 512MB as a supplement (only as needed). When the card pulled from the supplementary segment framerates drop and the game stutters.
It's no secret that Nvidia's largest competitor is AMD and when AMD saw the opportunity to tease Nvidia about the fudged card, they did.
Check out the FaceBook post by AMD, note the 970 minute sale:
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One of our officemates here at GameZone was a victim of the GTX 970. When asked to comment on his experience he responded with unintelligible sounds and a temper tantrum on a couch, along with the quote:
I don't know how to feel, but I know I'm mad.
[PC Gamer for specs]
This video on the subject is funny.
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