NVIDIA’s co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang has issued a statement regarding the infamous VRAM reports surrounding the GeForce GTX 970. Je-Hsun Huang admitted that this memory architecture was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer (otherwise the GTX970 would come with 3GB of VRAM) and that the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth.
Jen-Hsun Huang claimed that NVIDIA’s intention from the get-go was to offer a 4GB GPU, however that would not be possible for this particular model without this memory ‘capability’.
Moreover, Jen-Hsun Huang admitted that this feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.
In related news, there is a class action lawsuit – filed earlier this month – alleging that the 500MB segment of VRAM runs 80 percent slower than the 3.5GB of actual GDDR5, and that the card has fewer ROPs, or render output units, and less L2 cache than advertised.
Here is Jen-Hsun Huang’s full statement:
“Hey everyone,
Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.
We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.
GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.
Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.
Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.
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.
This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.
The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.
This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.
We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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