Nvidia isn’t exactly endearing itself to people unhappy with the upper 512MB VRAM performance on their GTX 970 cards. In a new attempted apology, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang optimistically refers to this segmented and reduced VRAM as a “feature.”
“GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth,” Huang states. “Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.”
“This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.”
That’s certainly the opinion of those attempting a class action lawsuit against Nvidia for what the suit claims are “products that do not perform or possess the capabilities advertised and represented.”
In Jen-Hsun’s view, people should actually have been excited about getting a 4GB Nvidia card (even if it’s mostly just 3.5GB which is used effectively) and not be so ungrateful. At least, that’s the way this part of the semi-apology comes across.
“Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.”
Still, he does end with “We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.” So that’s something.
