Graphics giant Nvidia has been hit with a false advertising lawsuit that accuses the company of exaggerating the performance capability of its GeForce GTX 970 graphics card.
PC World reports that the suit was leveled last Thursday, against Nvidia and Giga-Byte, a third-party graphics card manufacturer.
The key issue here is video card memory; Nvidia has been claiming that the GTX 970 uses 4GB of VRAM, but users say that it stops functioning properly after you reach 3.5GB. This causes demanding games to stutter and slow down once they break through that barrier. Which is not ideal, when you’re spending upwards of £250 for vanilla versions of the card.
Nvidia has admitted that the memory system on the 970 is different from some of its other cards, but says that performance issues should be minimal.
“When a game needs less than 3.5GB of video memory per draw command then it will only access the first partition,” the company wrote in response to concerns, “and 3rd party applications that measure memory usage will report 3.5GB of memory in use on GTX 970, but may report more for GTX 980 if there is more memory used by other commands. When a game requires more than 3.5GB of memory then we use both segments.”
The filed lawsuit seeks a jury trial and damages, and was filed on behalf of any comsumer in the US who bought a GTX 970. Nvidia is yet to issue an official response. Now it’s up to the judge to determine whether the case warrants a class action lawsuit.
