No, NVIDIA Is Not Offering Mass Refunds On GeForce GTX 970 Cards

It’s been quite the week for NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970, and for the company’s sake, it’s too bad it’s not for good reason. As I reported on Monday, a stink has been raised about the GTX 970’s architectural design that results in the final 500MB in the framebuffer being slower than the rest.

I’d like to pull a quote from that post:

One of the reasons I don’t consider this to be as huge an issue as some is because the vast majority of GTX 970 owners will not even surpass 3.5GB of VRAM to begin with. That takes special circumstances. If you’re running 4K, this is an issue you might want to be aware of, but for 1440p or lower, this bug is likely to be invisible. I’d say the same thing about 4K, but it seems like benchmarks could show a frame or two detriment.

After mulling the issue more since then, and after having perused numerous user comments, I still feel that’s all true. At 1440p or under, special circumstances are going to be required to push VRAM usage well above 3GB. That’s not to say that it’s hard to make it happen, though. Skyrim decked out with mods can use a lot of VRAM, for example. But even then, would a crippled 500MB make a noticeable difference? I haven’t seen great proof up to this point, but I am not ruling it out.

At 4K, things become a little more concerning, because as a resolution that pushes more than twice the pixels as 1440p, it’s going to be more bandwidth-heavy, plain and simple. As our friend Jay Jardin has commented before, a game like Shadow of Mordor works best with more than 4GB of VRAM, so if you purchase a 4GB card, you certainly wouldn’t want to know that the final 500MB is throttled.

TL;DR: Unless you run multi-GPU and push very high detail settings, there’s a good chance that the slower final 500MB in the framebuffer will not affect you.

Despite that being the case, headlines popped-up all over yesterday which said that NVIDIA would be offering refunds to those who want to return their GTX 970s. This all stems from an NVIDIA employee responding to a few people in a thread on the GeForce.com website and was completely blown out of proportion.

NVIDIA’s defense is that there’s nothing wrong with the GTX 970; the card’s design is intended. I am not sure if the company realized that the final 500MB was so much slower than the rest, but the fact of the matter is: NVIDIA promised a certain level of performance from its 970, and the card delivers it.

Example VRAM usage after playing Dying Light on a GTX 980 @ 1440p/Max Detail

That all said, NVIDIA does acknowledge that there have been some cases where community managers have been aiding 970 owners with regards to getting a refund, but that help isn’t anything more than these employees simply going to vendors on their behalf. Ultimately, NVIDIA has nothing to do with refunds; it’s the vendors that are selling the cards.

If you purchased a GTX 970 recently, chances are you won’t have a difficult time returning it, but if you’ve owned it for more than a month, you’re probably out-of-luck. After all, NVIDIA doesn’t consider the 970’s design to impair the card, and thus vendors won’t, either. But again, while there’s an undeniable effect on the final 500MB of the framebuffer, it’s not going to affect most people who own one in a noticeable way.

For those still a little concerned, there is some good news: NVIDIA’s going to be working on a driver optimization that will shift some lesser-important data to the affected 500MB of the framebuffer, such as window manager stuff. How well this can actually be executed, we’ll have to wait and see.