It’s been quite the ordeal for NVIDIA over the last couple weeks. First, the company received some major backlash over their GTX 970 “Memorygate” controversy, and then they received even more flack, by removing the overclocking capabilities of their GTX 900M series notebooks GPUs. They have since pledged to re-enable the feature, initially called a bug, in the March driver release. Unfortunately, the GTX 970 controversy continues, as the company is now being sued by its users.
Its retail network has tried to help out NVIDIA’s customers, offering partial to full refunds, on mis-spec’d GPU, but the company, and its partners have remained mostly silent about the situation. At least North American and European customers are getting treated much better than enthusiasts in India.
All of this, has led to an apology from NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang…
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.
While there is an apology at the very end, mostly addressing the mis-communication, or lack of communication, of the way that engineers figured out how to make the card a 4GB card, it doesn’t really admit guilt or wrong doing. The NVIDIA CEO stands behind his team.
Although the response to this controversy, at least in Europe, has only resulted in about 5% in returns, you have to wonder how most gamers truly feel about this. Especially since it would seem that a majority are quite happy with the gaming experience.
In my experience, NVIDIA touts mostly the gaming experience, and for the most part, the experience is good, and the benchmarks do line up with their claims. While there is no denying that specifications were mis-quoted, and there is a performance issue in extreme cases, when the remaining, much slower, 512MBs, is used, the GTX 970 is actually a 4GB card, when it comes down to it.
However, at the end of the day though, it’s what the PC enthusiasts and gamers think.
Do you think that Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang’s explanation, and apology, was sufficient? Or does this really need to be dragged into court? Would love to hear your thoughts below.
Source(s): Cinemablend / PC World / VR World / NVIDIA Blog