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NVIDIA GTX 970 Owners Report Unusual VRAM Behavior, Unable To Efficiently Allocate More Than 3.5GB

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It seems that NVIDIA’s GTX970 series of video cards is currently experiencing an odd VRAM behavior. According to multiple reports, GTX970 users are unable to efficiently use more than 3.5GB of VRAM. That’s a really awkward report, and unfortunately for the green team there are multiple ways to reproduce this current issue.

Guru3D‘s member ‘Milan’ tested both a GTX980 and GTX970 in a number of games, and was the first one reporting this awkward behavior. According to Milan, a GTX970 was allocating 3.5GB of VRAM in most recent triple-A games – like Far Cry 4, Crysis 3 and Watch_Dogs – whereas a GTX980 was using 4GB of VRAM (in the same scenes with the exact same settings). Naturally, both of these cards were equipped with 4GB of total VRAM.

Since then, a lot of GTX970 owners benchmarked and tested a number of games. To everyone’s surprise, Milan’s findings were spot on. GTX970 users have been reporting these past days that most games do not allocate the total amount of their VRAM, unless under extreme circumstances.

Guru3D’s member ‘aufkrawall2’ tested Hitman: Absolution’s and reported with similar results:

“Once more than 3.5GB gets allocated, there is a huge frametime spike. The same scene can be tested to get reproducible results. In 4k, memory usage stays below 3.5GB and there is no extreme spike. But in 5k (4x DSR with 1440p), at the same scene, there is a huge fps drop once the game wants to allocate 2-300MB at once and burst the 3.5GB. It happens in the tutorial mission when encountering the tennis field. With older driver (344.11 instead of 347.09), memory usage is lower, but you can enable MSAA to get high VRAM usage and thus be able to reproduce by 100%.”

Overclock.net‘s member ‘Serandur’ decided to run some additional benchmarks in Skyrim and came to some interesting conclusions. According to Serandur, GTX970 cards are able to use more than 3.5GB of VRAM only when they absolutely need them.

Serandur tested Skyrim at 5120×2880 with using noAA, 2xMSAA, 4xMSAA and 8xMSAA.

As Serandur wrote:

NoAA: Skyrim peaked at about 3600 MBs in usage with occasional brief hitching while loading new textures in and out of VRAM. GPU usage remained well below 99% on each card.

2xMSAA: Skyrim once again peaked at about 3600 MBs with the mentioned hitching, this time somewhat more frequently. Once again, GPU usage remained well below 99%.

4xMSAA: Skyrim yet again peaked at about 3600 MBs and hitched much more prominently and frequently at the same time as VRAM usage droppped down 100-200 MBs. GPU usage was below 99% again with FPS still at 60 aside from those hitches.

8xMSAA: Now Skyrim was using the full 4 GB framebuffer with massive stuttering and hitching from a lack of VRAM. This time, I had to stare at the ground to keep GPU usage below 99% and retain 60 FPS. I ran around Whiterun just staring at the ground and it remained at 60 FPS except with those massive hitches where GPU usage and framerate temporarily plummeted. This last run merely indicated that Skyrim can indeed use more VRAM than it was with the previous 3 settings and so the issue seems to be with the 970s themselves rather than just the game in this example. The performance degradation aside from VRAM was severe, but that could just be 8xMSAA at 5K taking its calculative toll.

But why such a thing is happening? According to some, this might be a hardware issue or due to the way GTX970 handles its VRAM controller. Whether this can be fixed via a new software driver remains to be seen.

Kudos to our reader ‘Blackburn Whiteknight’ for bringing this to our attention.

83 thoughts on “NVIDIA GTX 970 Owners Report Unusual VRAM Behavior, Unable To Efficiently Allocate More Than 3.5GB”

  2. I don’t know, I’ve seen this using 3.6GB of VRAM in Assassins Creed Unity but my old R9 280 use to stutter badly on game start filling up the VRAM with ultra high textures, even though the full 3GB wasn’t being used.

    I have a few videos using 3.6GB VRAM on maxed settings TXAA with one frame-rate spike but over 3.6GB VRAM was being used before then anyway.

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  3. I can confirm that its usually 3.5GB (max 3.6GB) @4K over that it hits a VRAM wall. The guys over at Guru3D have a spreadsheet and the problem is the same. http://goo.gl/gNV1SE
    Edit: wrong site referenced previously

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  4. I can confirm it.

    VRAM – 4k DSR(1600p native) – MaxSettings

    MGS GZ 3.540
    Hitman Absolution 3.442
    Metro Redux (SSA 0.5) 3.654
    Witcher 2(ubber on) 3.543
    Watch Dogs(4k ultra/high) 3.532
    Skyrim REAL VISION (1600p native) 3.531
    Stalker CoP (4k) – 1090
    MSI Fire Strike Ultra 3423

    WTF NVIDIA!

    RIG:
    GTX970 Superclocked ACX 2.0 04G-P4-2974-KR
    i7 3770k
    Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB
    GA-Z77X-UD5H
    Corsair CX-750W 80 Bronze
    NVIDIA driver (up to date)

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      1. Bios: 04G-P4-2974-KR SLI 2x + i7 3770k(non oc)

        Shadow of mordor(4k DSR)
        Metal Gear Solid GZ (4k DSR)
        Witcher 2(no uber – 4k DSR)
        Sniper Elite (4k)
        Skyrim modded(1600p native)

        Only at Skyrim some stutters at reaching new areas of the game!

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          1. I can confirm it.

            VRAM – 4k DSR(1600p native) – MaxSettings

            MGS GZ 3.540
            Hitman Absolution 3.442
            Metro Redux (SSA 0.5) 3.654
            Witcher 2(ubber on) 3.543
            Watch Dogs(4k ultra/high) 3.532
            Skyrim REAL VISION (1600p native) 3.531
            Stalker CoP (4k) – 1090
            MSI Fire Strike Ultra 3423

            WTF NVIDIA!

    3. dude I do the same style of test.. put a real gpu demanding game under the gun like crysis 3, Dragon Age Inq, Shadow of mordor ect ect at 4k dsr… you will max out no problem… And btw why are you using 1600p in SLI,,,, SLI really you should be doing 4K if you want to use up that V-ram… Makes you look new to PC gaming.. Just saying… And your whole punch line makes you look like a AMD shill on the payroll to spread FUD.

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        1. 2560×1600 is not 4K… Been making my own rigs since 1999… Had Voodoo2’s in SLI back when SLI was 3DFX’s tech.

          4096 x 2160 4K much? And besides DSR only goes to 3840×2160

          And for the record I don’t have V-ram issues with my G1 970. Don’t know what certain peoples problems are. And others confirm that even show pics that they own the cards that they don’t have issues

          Sounds like you are NEW major tech sites had this story 6 days ago and proven all BS.

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          1. Oh, I’m thinking millions of pixels, not thousands across. 4096×2160 is ridiculous. Ugh, I have a feeling 4k gaming won’t take off for another decade, at least.

          2. 2017/2018 with Nvidia’s Volta and AMD’s 500 series. Dealing with 2nd gen HBM stacked memory and Nvidia’s mainstream version of Nvlink and what ever AMD developers to be like Nvlink for their gpus.

            Besides well optimized games depending on the games engine will not push the full limits of v-ram even on AMD cards. Only games like Crysis 3 do at 4K using 8XMsaa not a game like Skyrim lol

            And using 8xMsaa at 4K is a must if you are playing on a 46inch or bigger 4K TV using Hdmi 2.0 or DP if the TV supports DP

          3. NVlink wont be on desktop for very long time if ever!
            reasons:
            future PCI-E spec will not be significantly slower and bus speed is not crucial to game performance anyway
            energy-efficiency is not that big on desktop where only 1/2 graphics are used
            price difference will be probably huge and I would love to see intel/amd to adopt that
            NVlink is aimed on professional market!

          4. not true dude. Nvlink will be for mainstream… it’s not limited to just server use… don’t sound worried about it. It’s gonna be fun times when it is on mainstream none pro cards.

          5. 2x 970s can’t really handle 4K that well on Triple-A titles at Ultra settings. I rather have a stable 60fps ultra setting at 1600p (Dell Ultra Sharp) than random lag spike and stutters at 2160p (Asus PQ321Q). This is speaking from experience, as I own the hardwares I’m referencing.

          7. Did you even read the article or just skim through it with selective reading on words you want to hear? That article basically back up what I said.

            “There is something we need to discuss, and that is what cards are more appropriate for what resolutions of gaming. After this evaluation, we strongly feel that if you are going to be gaming on a 4K display you should spend the extra cash and spring for GeForce GTX 980 SLI. While GeForce GTX 970 SLI can deliver an “OK” 4K gaming experience, we did have to make image quality sacrifices in every game. GeForce GTX 970 SLI cannot “max out” 4K gaming. You will simply have a much better gameplay experience going with GeForce GTX 980 SLI.”

            That is the truth. 2x 970s can not really handle 4K that well on Triple A titles at ultra settings.

            Besides, you cannot tell a person how to play with their hardware that you don’t have experience with in the first place. What makes you think you are 100% correct or right in your statements when you have never experienced it your self. He has to game in 1600p, because in 4K, the 970s SLI still struggles.

            The better way to approach it without sounding like a-know-it-all-ass that makes you look like a dumbass. Is to simply ask, “Why are you not gaming in 4K those 2x 970s?!” The answer is, because it’s still not a 60fps smooth experience at ultra settings.

            Also, gaming at 3840x2160P with 8X MSAA? Sure, if you enjoy watching slide shows. The higher the resolution you go up, the unnecessary it becomes with applying AA.

            The 3.5GB usage on the 970 is not a BS. Nvidia even confirmed and explained why it was set up that way.

            http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Responds-GTX-970-35GB-Memory-Issue

      2. These pictures are pointless since this faulty card starts dropping frames after the 3.5gb ram are getting used.

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  7. Another thing I noticed its when im playing lord of the fallen on my lg 47 inch tv my pc restart random alone. No error no blue screen nothing. When I use my monitor I can play 3 hours non stop and all works fine. Temps are good. This is driving me crazy.
    The lg tv is connected with hdmi and my monitor is 120 hz and is connected with d dvi.
    Im using nvidia dsr to downsample from 4k to 1080p. Maybe its cable bandwidth related issue? Or drivers?

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  9. Ok, he approved it.It can utilize 4075MB on my MSI GTX970, so i believe it’s all good and maybe NVIDIA has to fix it with newer drivers.

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      1. Or NVIDIA did this on purpose in order to increase the difference between the GTX970 and the GTX980.

        I doubt its a hardware problem, because both 970 and 980 have the same chipset(GM204).

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  10. Guys some very good info found on the Nvidia forums

    “I too am an owner of the 970 chip, precisely the MSI GTX 970 “4Gb” card. I’m currently attending my second year in college and heading into the computer science, software engineering fields where I intend to major. Anyhow, Nvidia breaching their advertised chip statistics kept bothering me all day, so I paid a visit to my dads lawyer after lunch and he told me that if it does in fact turn out that the cards cannot exceed 3.5Gb or live up to the expectations of the given stats by Nvidia, there is room for a lawsuit(s).

    I gave him all my info (all the agreements and such of purchase) and he’ll get back to me later this week or early next week. But the important part which he emphasized several times is DO NOT UPGRADE from here on out because that will void the current agreement, meaning if Nvidia covers all the loopholes in the purchase/upgrade agreement with the next driver update, and you choose to update, you abide to the updated drivers agreement. So, if a new driver update does get released, don’t instantly update. Let the pawns go first and see if the update fixes/improves the issues or if it’ll be Nvidia covering their as**s.”

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    1. So your saying if Nvidia releases a fix, don’t do it so you and your team of a*shats can sue? f’ you, you’re everything that’s wrong with the world.

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  12. I’m sure it’s not an hardware issue it must be related to drivers coz why everyone suddenly noticing all this vram issue few months later now after the release when the benchmarks had been done on games like Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor, Watch Dogs and many other on several resolutions including the 4K? there are even videos on youtube people maxed out games on 970 and they are running without any stuttering etc.

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      1. I saw many reviews some reviewers even talked about vram too but none of them mentioned such issue at the time and during their testings they ran several AAA titles on 4k and 1440p resolutions there was no stuttering or need for more vram.. :/ I wonder why this all happen suddenly that drives me to think that it’s an software related issue maybe.

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  13. This is old news and has been proven to be BS. I have done many test on games and have had no problems with maxing out my 4gigs

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      1. All the tech sites wccftech, hardC, pcper, guru3d ect ect all done storys on this all showed results and had no problems. only bad programming games were the issues.

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          1. ummm yes they have… don’t be lame. I even posted a link from 6 days ago but it’s on hold waiting for approval…

    2. i still don’t know the problem, it hits the limite in 3.5GB ? or after it goes more than 3.5GB it drops fps ? i tested on mordor at 4k and i hit 3.8GB, of course i had a bad frame rate, it was on 4k with ultra settings (duh), it was 27 to 35fps

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      1. people are getting these cards that are pretty much noobs because of the price and they think that games on Ultra at 1080p should use all the memory so they are thinking it should use all the memory.

        Heck almost every game on the market as of right now don’t even use over 3.8gig’s even with DSR at 4K using the highest type of AA it uses.

        Only game I own that I got to Max out my cards v-ram was Cysis 3 at 4K DSR with msaaX8 funny thing I was only getting 1.4 to 8fps

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    1. Bit of a bummer but congrats on getting it, luckily and sadly I’ll only be able to build a new rig with a 970 in 3 or so months so by then any and all problems should be fixed

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        1. Thanks, odd though card has been out for a few months and this has come to light only now?

          Decided that the 970 is the way to go, interested in the 960 but 128 bus and 2GB VRAM is really a let down especially since with the current state if ports means beefy specs are needed, and DSR seems to be a great feature even if it’s performance drops dramtically

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  16. I’ve just done some mesurements and the results are shocking!
    I think I’m gonna be RMAing my card.
    (p.s.) Could anyone with ATI do the same please to make sure it’s not the Afterburner’s fault?
    (p.s.2) 3072MB it’s a preset’s name, the actual usage on the bottom picture shows 3886 MB in yellow.

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    3. I’ve launched 4 kombustors with 1024 MB buffers and I can confirm that it may be a Kombustor’s fault as this time all of the VRAM has been allocated and there was a minimal FPS drop 4 x 85 FPS so 340 FPS in total (I was CPU limited) Conclusion: I doubt there is any hardware fault, at least in my 970.

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  18. Heh, yeah. Those agreements you “sign” when you hit “OK” are incredible. I’m not sure how they’re legally allowed to bury an agreement under a mountain of text that forces you to forgo your consumer rights.

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  19. “unfortunately for the green team there are multiple ways to reproduce this current issue.” … I think you misinterpret how they may look at that. If it happens enough that helps narrow it down. At least from a developing standpoint more often it happens easier to see what is needed to fix it, especially if the cards literally have 4GBs of ram on them.

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  20. Bought a 290 instead for $269 at newegg. But I feel bad for you guys, hardware/driver issues are no fun at all.

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  21. I think people are losing it for nothing. at worst case nVIDIA is messing with drivers to boost 980 sales. at best it’s just games that don’t use over that much VRAM. the truth is games don’t give a damn about VRAM, neither should we.

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  22. there seems to be something I’m not understanding, is it really a surprise to anyone that when running something that takes up more Vram, it also is somthing that most likely are going to be more demanding for the GPU? does anyone see it as a bad thing if there is unused system memory free as well?

    having more Vram than what the GPU can utilize in most cases is a good thing, you do not want to have a lot of free GPU horsepower, but limited by that the Vram is all used up.

    I had 2+GTX 690 cards, a real powerhouse of a GPU card with 5,6 Gflops over 980’s 4,6 Gflops, but moving over to 1440p the 2gb of Vram was holding the cards back way too much, the GPU’s rarely was over 50% but there was not enough to work from in the Vram on newer games, textures in different LOD had trouble loading and so forth.

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    1. It’s about using 4GB VRAM efficiently not being able to use 4GB at all. The semantic benchmarks show issues utilising VRAM over 3.5GB but the games don’t show this because there is no degradation in the frame-rate after 3.5GB like the benchmarks are showing.

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        1. No, don’t worry about it, it’s just not reflected in games from what I’ve seen on my GTX 970. Stress test benchmarks are not games and don’t reflect real world usage.

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  24. Don’t you bloody understand? It’s not a wide spread issue. It’s only happening to a certain number of cards

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    1. I understand that you don’t have a f’ing clue nor do you own a 970. so just stfu about thing you don’t understand. period

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  25. Things is, games don’t show this sort of degradation of performance when using over 3.5GB of VRAM. I can run ACU at 4K at a stable 18-20fps and that’s using way over 3,5GB of VRAM. Maybe there is an issue with the initial load of the game but that’s nothing new, My R9 280 used to do the same with ultra high textures using 3GB VRAM.

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  27. To further prove my point. I just played shadow of mordor at ultra textures which is meant for 6GB vram and my vram usage never, ever was at 4GB. It was constantly at 3.5GB

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    1. wow you believe what developers say.. even AMD cards with 4gig’s don’t use all 4gig’s in shadow of mordor… move along.

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  28. People point finger at Nvidia, the Hardware, etc. Though, they don’t doubt the software. Please use different software to see if they are all reporting the same VRAM usage. It could be the software not properly displaying the correct usage for the 970.

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  29. I just reposted some info that someone mentioned on the Nvidia forums. I’ve been caught up in the gunfire for no reason. Anyway it might be card specific to me that VRAM utilization doesnt go above 3.6GB. I’ve relayed the info to bigger more knowledgable sites to test (that also have a few models in hand) and we will have to wait and see what Nvidia says.

    I might have phrased the repost slightly wrong and I’m sorry. I have edited it.

    Reply

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