4 ms·

Another GTX 970-esque abomination sounds like.

by salawat 4y ago

izacus 4y ago
What?
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  The GTX970 is a fun bit of hardware. It's marketed as a 4GB RAM card. In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Not even good for that, even just reading the slow VRAM slows down the entire GPU, so you never want to use the last 512MiB.
  - izacus 4y ago
    I owned the 970 for 7+ years and I remember all about that bruahaha. I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day. It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks. And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      I am still owning a GTX970, one of the fans has failed (but then that's just aging), and the last 512MB is awful. Main memory operates at 192Gbps,last block at 28Gbps. It is easily felt, and most GTX970 owners explicitly tried to not use that memory, especially on games that swap assets often (open world games are deadly) The last 512MB bit was mentioned nowhere in benchmarks or marketing material, until people realised something was wrong and nvidia said "teehee woopsies"
      - izacus 4y ago
        I'd love to hear any kind of citation about this "avoiding of last 512MB", because after the initial screaming, the issue kinda disappeared and pretty much every open-world game I threw at it ran just fine on High @ 1080p (or even 1440p in many cases). Sure, the numbers in benchmarks do drop off, but what was the actual effect when you ran an actual game on it? I never had to "avoid" anything and haven't really seen any notes about doing that outside the benchmark readers.
wmf 4y ago
The 970 was one of the greatest gaming cards of all time.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Not true at all - it seemed like a great deal at the time but aged very poorly. You could run a 980 today and still be doing great. Everyone I know with a 970 is struggling At the time you would have been much better off going for a 780 as they had some bargains - especially on the more rare 780 with lots of ram
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I still have a 970 and it's doing fine. 60 FPS 4K Rocket League. I dunno what games and settings you guys are using but I'm sure it could handle something more demanding if I just turn the settings down. I will never upgrade!
    - tracker1 4y ago
      Enjoy Cyberpunk at 12fps.
  - PebblesHD 4y ago
    I was running a heavily overclocked 970 until about 7 months ago when I upgraded to an ultrawide monitor. Before that, it was more than happy playing the games I played at 2560p at only a few fps slower than my partner’s 980. For the price it cost me, it was an excellent card, and i paid more than triple adjusted for inflation for the 3070 that replaced it.
- Matthias247 4y ago
  I seriously enjoyed mine and didn't understand what the fuzz was about. Sure - it might have had less memory than people expected - but in the end the game performance for the price point mattered for me. And that was great. I got a card which delivered great performance at that point in time (certainly similar to what a 4080 12GB is for todays generation of games) for less than 350€.

Another GTX 970-esque abomination sounds like.

izacus 4y ago

What?

ohgodplsno 4y ago
The GTX970 is a fun bit of hardware. It's marketed as a 4GB RAM card. In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Not even good for that, even just reading the slow VRAM slows down the entire GPU, so you never want to use the last 512MiB.
- izacus 4y ago
  I owned the 970 for 7+ years and I remember all about that bruahaha. I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day. It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks. And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    I am still owning a GTX970, one of the fans has failed (but then that's just aging), and the last 512MB is awful. Main memory operates at 192Gbps,last block at 28Gbps. It is easily felt, and most GTX970 owners explicitly tried to not use that memory, especially on games that swap assets often (open world games are deadly) The last 512MB bit was mentioned nowhere in benchmarks or marketing material, until people realised something was wrong and nvidia said "teehee woopsies"
    - izacus 4y ago
      I'd love to hear any kind of citation about this "avoiding of last 512MB", because after the initial screaming, the issue kinda disappeared and pretty much every open-world game I threw at it ran just fine on High @ 1080p (or even 1440p in many cases). Sure, the numbers in benchmarks do drop off, but what was the actual effect when you ran an actual game on it? I never had to "avoid" anything and haven't really seen any notes about doing that outside the benchmark readers.

wmf 4y ago

The 970 was one of the greatest gaming cards of all time.

Melatonic 4y ago
Not true at all - it seemed like a great deal at the time but aged very poorly. You could run a 980 today and still be doing great. Everyone I know with a 970 is struggling At the time you would have been much better off going for a 780 as they had some bargains - especially on the more rare 780 with lots of ram
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I still have a 970 and it's doing fine. 60 FPS 4K Rocket League. I dunno what games and settings you guys are using but I'm sure it could handle something more demanding if I just turn the settings down. I will never upgrade!
  - tracker1 4y ago
    Enjoy Cyberpunk at 12fps.
- PebblesHD 4y ago
  I was running a heavily overclocked 970 until about 7 months ago when I upgraded to an ultrawide monitor. Before that, it was more than happy playing the games I played at 2560p at only a few fps slower than my partner’s 980. For the price it cost me, it was an excellent card, and i paid more than triple adjusted for inflation for the 3070 that replaced it.
Matthias247 4y ago
I seriously enjoyed mine and didn't understand what the fuzz was about. Sure - it might have had less memory than people expected - but in the end the game performance for the price point mattered for me. And that was great. I got a card which delivered great performance at that point in time (certainly similar to what a 4080 12GB is for todays generation of games) for less than 350€.