Nvidia’s advertising of the GTX 970 as a card with 4GB of VRAM has come back to haunt them, as the company has just agreed to settle a consolidation of fifteen separate class action lawsuits alleging false advertising. News of the settlement comes from TopClassActions, a site which keeps track of such lawsuits.
The first lawsuit against Nvidia was filed in February 2015 and claimed “false advertising [and] deceptive business practice” regarding the 970’s VRAM capabilities. Readers of PC Invasion may well be familiar with the issue, where due to the 3.5GB/0.5GB split distribution of VRAM, 970 GPUs slowed significantly when utilising more than the ‘main’ 3.5GB. Many users felt advertising this as a full 4GB of VRAM was misleading on Nvidia’s part, and filed suits accordingly.
Settlement documents seen by TopClassActions state that Nvidia will now “pay each buyer of the graphics card $30 and will pay an additional $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees.” Nvidia has indicated there will not be a cap on the total payout. At this time, instructions on how to actually claim that $30 (and who will be eligible to claim) have not been released. As it’s a set of US class action lawsuit, it’s likely to only apply to US customers.
In accepting the settlement, Nvidia have not admitted to any of the allegations of wrongdoing.
