NVIDIA Lawsuit Controversy

With the release of NVIDIA's GTX 970, a lawsuit has followed regarding the 4GB version of the GTX 970.

The GTX 970 comes with 4GB of VRAM, however, the performance of the 970 becomes drastically reduced once more than 3.5GB of VRAM is used. This is because the memory is segmented; the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth, which results in a performance drop.

This has lead to NVIDIA receiving a class action lawsuit after users discovered this problem; claiming that the card was falsely advertised due to the VRAM problems. Users are seeking refunds and a judge will decide whether or not the lawsuit will continue. What kind of excuse will the business give I wonder? NVIDIA gave an official statement in response to the lawsuit:

"GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment. Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch."

- Jen-Hsun, NVIDIA

I am an NVIDIA fan-boy myself, I think they make great hardware products and have delivered solid performance and driver support for the last decade. And the performance of their GTX 980M (Which is what I have) is stellar and nothing below impressive. However, this event has shaken my faith a bit in NVIDIA, and I simply cannot buy the excuse that they failed to communicate such an important piece of information. It would make far more sense from a marketing stand-point that they would not mention it, as who would want to buy a top-of-line graphics card with "fake RAM"?

It's just a shame that they tried to sweep a crap part of their product under the mat and hope that no one notices. Personally I hope that NVIDIA learns their lesson from this and tries to be honest with their loyal customers from here on.