You may remember (unless you are a goldfish or simply didn’t read it) that earlier this week we reported on a lawsuit filed against Nvidia for falsely advertising its GeForce GTX 970 card.
Well, a representative from the company has responded – not to the lawsuit itself – but to general consumer disappointment with both the card’s performance and Nvidia’s marketing of it.
“Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it,” writes Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. “I can see why, so let me address it.”
“GTX 970 is a 4GB card,” he continues. “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.”
Huang says that his team should have done a better hob of explaining the technicalities, but says that the 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is “used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying.” Or not enjoying, judging by the volume of complaints.
Still, he does end by saying that the “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.”
The lawsuit against Nvidia is still in the pipeline, and there are still plenty of disfruntled customers out there, so this probably isn’t the last we’ll hear of the issue.
