GTX 970 3.5GB Vram Issue (BAD NEWS)

[policematrix]

watch this [video=youtube;spZJrsssPA0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0[/video]
on a serious note i think my whole pc is broke idk what it is but i get stutters in every game
[video=youtube;2lfa67kWFuA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lfa67kWFuA&feature=youtu.be[/video] take alook notice you can see it clearly when i look at the ground near the end

 

[policematrix]

oh and for a comparison here is same game same version on same GPU
[video=youtube;CCmEePhjdIc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmEePhjdIc[/video]

 

[Buzz]

Try checking in Device Manager and see if our PCI Bus (and other motherboard devices) are using Microsoft drivers or not. Try updating the PCI bus and chipset drivers. If you already updated, try downloading the original chipset drivers from motherboard manufacture website and see if the problem persists.

 

[policematrix]

I have done these things and it remains, thanks for the help.

 

[policematrix]

I have emailed PCspecialists many times but im getting no response from them I know this is nothing to do with the Nvidia scandal my problem seems unique so im hopping its just a bad GPU and replacing it will fix this issue but im worried it may be a combination of things trouble is I have no way to find out I can do my bit at fault finding but I can not test voltages etc I need expert help to find the problem.
Having already RMA the whole machine and had it sent back im not holding much hope

Is there any chance certain motherboard / CPU combinations could cause these kinds of bugs ?

I have
Z97X-Gaming 3
i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 970
250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2003FZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X FURY DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)

I asked PCS if one stick of RAM could cause it and they said no.


EDIT:
I tried running at lower resolutions and it still happens constantly

 

[mrducking]

watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0
on a serious note i think my whole pc is broke idk what it is but i get stutters in every game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lfa67kWFuA&feature=youtu.be take alook notice you can see it clearly when i look at the ground near the end

i had to watch it without sound, otherwise i couldnt focus on the text
thats an old old old video from spain, and it's hard to understand him even when you were born in spain

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

I've emailed the provider of my 2 MSI GTX970's and simply asked what their stance is on the situation. I'm not sure if they will be even aware of it but have asked if they would allow me to return them and replace them with 2 GTX 980's instead and i would pay the difference. I'll let you know what they come back with. On the Nvidia forums they are giving the impression that if you really want to return them to pm the Nvidia guy and he will speak to retailers on your behalf to come to a resolution. This is in America however so not sure what impact this will have in the UK if any. I'll let you know any outcome i receive.

 

[Tom DWC]

Without having looked into it at all, my first assumption would be that you should be able to get a refund out of any retailer in the UK, through no fault of their own they've been mis-sold.

I was worried at first at how this might affect 1440p performance, but at the end of the day I was happy with the performance numbers I saw before I purchased the card and those haven't changed despite this revelation. It's still a hell of a performer for the price.

I can understand why so many people are peeved at NVIDIA though. I expect retailers will be as well!

 

[policematrix]

Without having looked into it at all, my first assumption would be that you should be able to get a refund out of any retailer in the UK, through no fault of their own they've been mis-sold.

I was worried at first at how this might affect 1440p performance, but at the end of the day I was happy with the performance numbers I saw before I purchased the card and those haven't changed despite this revelation. It's still a hell of a performer for the price.

I can understand why so many people are peeved at NVIDIA though. I expect retailers will be as well!

It would seem that I have fixed my in game stutter and it seems that MSi Afterburner was the cause O_O so im pretty happy with the card BUT what about the future already I can use DSR to get 4K on my 1080 monitor so I still feel cheated in respect to future proofing =(

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

Without having looked into it at all, my first assumption would be that you should be able to get a refund out of any retailer in the UK, through no fault of their own they've been mis-sold.

I was worried at first at how this might affect 1440p performance, but at the end of the day I was happy with the performance numbers I saw before I purchased the card and those haven't changed despite this revelation. It's still a hell of a performer for the price.

I can understand why so many people are peeved at NVIDIA though. I expect retailers will be as well!

Absolutely agree with your, i said that in may email to the retailer, saying that i understand that it is not your fault but would appreciate a response and to be honest im not fully bothered if they come back with a negative response. Yes i feel slightly disappointing but the card is still very impressive and playable, just want to be given the option really.

Im not really that bothered about Nvidia either they offered a 4GB card and thats what i got, just its a slightly different configuration that i had expected.

Im sure they didn't mean anything bad to happen. I just expect these things to happen from time to time.

It would seem that I have fixed my in game stutter and it seems that MSi Afterburner was the cause O_O so im pretty happy with the card BUT what about the future already I can use DSR to get 4K on my 1080 monitor so I still feel cheated in respect to future proofing =(

Yeah the MSI afterburner app does create some issues sometimes on certiain games, i just uninstalled it and most problems seemed to dissapear.

 

[Spuff]

It would seem that I have fixed my in game stutter and it seems that MSi Afterburner was the cause O_O so im pretty happy with the card BUT what about the future already I can use DSR to get 4K on my 1080 monitor so I still feel cheated in respect to future proofing =(

DSR can be very good, it was very good for Skyrim. In AC Unity I tried DSR but I preferred the image quality without. DSR can be good, but it is not the same as viewing on a truly higher resolution monitor.
People are talking as if use of that last .5GB will ruin your experience of a game - is there any clear evidence for that? Also if a game is needing to use near 4GB VRAM what is to stop future games needing more than 4GB? How much future do you need to be proofed for? (I talk in relation to 1080p).
I bought a 780 thinking that would last me at least a couple of years, but the 900's came out with their performance, DSR, lower power consumption, overclockability, so I switched to a 970. The 780 had 3GB RAM.
The 970 remains the best GPU in my budget range.

 

[policematrix]

DSR can be very good, it was very good for Skyrim. In AC Unity I tried DSR but I preferred the image quality without. DSR can be good, but it is not the same as viewing on a truly higher resolution monitor.
People are talking as if use of that last .5GB will ruin your experience of a game - is there any clear evidence for that? Also if a game is needing to use near 4GB VRAM what is to stop future games needing more than 4GB? How much future do you need to be proofed for? (I talk in relation to 1080p).
I bought a 780 thinking that would last me at least a couple of years, but the 900's came out with their performance, DSR, lower power consumption, overclockability, so I switched to a 970. The 780 had 3GB RAM.
The 970 remains the best GPU in my budget range.

I agree its a beast of a card no doubt and DSR even though it is in essance a fake 4K res looks so much better than any 1080 with AA maxed out the detail is awesome, the problem with the VRAM seems to be this any game will stop at around 3.5 GB of VRAM you can FORCE it by putting AA max and so on but then as soon as you go over into 4 GB you get very low FPS if you then reduce the stuff like AA it will be playable with all the 4GB used but it would seem that nvidias drivers try as hard as they can NOT to use that extra 500MB of slower VRAM

This explains it much more technically http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html

Our product reviews in the past few months and its conclusion are not any different opposed to everything that has happened in the past few days, the product still performans similar to what we have shown you as hey .. it is in fact the same product. The cluster**** that Nvidia dropped here is simple, they have not informed the media or their customers about the memory partitioning and the challenges they face. Overall you will have a hard time pushing any card over 3.5 GB of graphics memory usage with any game unless you do some freaky stuff. The ones that do pass 3.5 GB mostly are poor console ports or situations where you game in Ultra HD or DSR Ultra HD rendering. In that situation I cannot guarantee that your overall experience will be trouble free, however we have a hard time detecting and replicating the stuttering issues some people have mentioned.

 

[Spuff]

so on but then as soon as you go over into 4 GB you get very low FPS

This explains it much more technically http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html

Any card will have issues if the demand on its memory is greater than the amount of memory it has, 970, 980 or anything.

'As you can see, there is very little change in the performance of the GTX 970 relative to GTX 980 on these games when it is using the 0.5GB segment.'

 

[keynes]

It seems some retailers in the UK are offering refunds and exchanges of the GTX 970

 

[policematrix]

It seems some retailers in the UK are offering refunds and exchanges of the GTX 970

Yes but what GPU would you buy ? AMD would leave me skint with the leccy bill on its own :wacko:

 

[mrducking]

they should just deactivate that 0.5GB of VRAM, this is ridiculous
if this is making such a problem nvidia should just fix it and forget about it, but nnnoooooo, nvidia already said that this works as it should and they are going to do nothing about it someone should really punch the guy in charge, he is losing clients and money by the second

 

[Spuff]

they should just deactivate that 0.5GB of VRAM, this is ridiculous
if this is making such a problem nvidia should just fix it and forget about it,

What is the big problem and ridiculous? The article cited in posts above, which is by no means uncritical of Nvidia, says it is cannot reproduce any big problem when the last .5GB is utilised.

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html
'I again stick to my initial findings here, there's no significant evidence that once your graphics memory runs out and starts using the 512MB (or not at all) that you can see massive and weird behavior'

he is losing clients and money by the second

Do you have the figures on that?

 

[mrducking]

What is the big problem and ridiculous? The article cited in posts above, which is by no means uncritical of Nvidia, says it is cannot reproduce any big problem when the last .5GB is utilised.

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html
'I again stick to my initial findings here, there's no significant evidence that once your graphics memory runs out and starts using the 512MB (or not at all) that you can see massive and weird behavior'



Do you have the figures on that?

ok, i came all hyped up from another forum
i dont know which article you are talking about but in UHD or some aplications that use more than 3.5GB there is a noticeable drop, specially in games
there were numbers somewhere but i cant remember where i saw them, but from what i remember in some games performance dropped as much as 40% when using that 0.5GB, i will try to find them again, see if i can post them here (just saw your link, will read it later)

also, when talking about performance drop im pretty sure it will highly depend on the type of application you are using, if you need to write AND read from that 0.5GB performance IS going to drop, if you only need to read im guessing is not going to drop so much
like it or not the gtx 970 HAS a bottleneck, but as any system with a bottleneck there is situations when it doesnt matter: if you have a bottleneck in the cpu but dont play cpu demanding games then your are not going to see performance drop (just an example, im trying to transmit something but im finding it hard to express myself properly)

neverminding all that, im more ****ed at the fact that in spite of this being a PR nightmare that could negatively affect sells they dont care in the least, and THIS is what make me crazy, if they simply were to deactivate the 0.5GB it would still outperform the 290, heck it would still be the best performance/price card out there, low heat, low noise, low price, high performance
another thing i dont understand is why did they do this instead of simply cutting down costs of production and simply selling the 970 with only 3.5GB or 3GB of vram
just in case i didnt express myself properly(totally my fault, i know) the 970 is an AWESOME card, but it has a bottleneck and it's a bottleneck so easy to fix it's ridiculous that nvidia refuses to fix it despite the PR nightmare they are having right now

 

[policematrix]

What is the big problem and ridiculous? The article cited in posts above, which is by no means uncritical of Nvidia, says it is cannot reproduce any big problem when the last .5GB is utilised.

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html
'I again stick to my initial findings here, there's no significant evidence that once your graphics memory runs out and starts using the 512MB (or not at all) that you can see massive and weird behavior'



Do you have the figures on that?

There is some discussion of the card actually prefaring sytem RAM over that 500mb of VRAM and this is why everyhting goes to pot over 3.5GB
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/808066/geforce-900-series/gtx-970-prefers-system-ram-over-video-ram-3-5gb-vram-1gb-sram-/post/4445786/#4445786

I believe this to be the case if it is then this can be improved to use the faster VRAM (faster than system RAM) but I would imagine Nvidia did this for a reason beacause remember they knew about this since day 1 so im presuming the card is fully optimised but only time will tell, I am in constant discussions with Nvidia but all they seem to do is say "its a good card for the money even after this " which is true and "I can help you get your money back" they would not offer refunds if there was no problem.

 

[Spuff]

Personally I would be amazed that you can attempt to achieve reasonable frame rates with a single card in this price range at 4K with ultra max settings. If you really are pushing the card, perhaps you are needing more than 4GB and then it will use 3.5 plus system RAM rather than trying to use 3 pools of RAM.
I don't think you can draw any definite conclusions from the figures that GPU-Z, or any single application, reports. Perhaps GPU-Z can only read the 3.5 of VRAM and not the other .5 . The test above used a heavily user modded game, and you cannot discount that from causing odd behaviour.
In the articled I linked to everything did not go to pot for them on the one game they could find that could push beyond 3.5GB.