Quote:Hey everyone,

Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.

We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.

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.

Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.

Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.

This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.

The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.

This 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.

Jen-Hsun

(03-12-2015, 06:48 AM)gstanford Wrote: There is 4gb on the card and all 4gb is usable.

They would have to put a crossbar or ringbus on the L2 caches to do any better and that would cost more silicon than they had to play with at 28nm as well as be a lot more complex.

I certainly cannot complain about the way my 970's perform and I have them in SLI which makes the problem even worse if you believe the bleatings of the FanATics and AMD PR.

(03-13-2015, 07:56 AM)gstanford Wrote: I will wait until they have HDMI 2.0 (properly working HDMI 2.0, not just checkmark HDMI 2.0), 60 hz and the price drops to the same level as my Hisense cost me.

Really I'd probably want DP or DVI on the TV as well, since I'm not confident HDMI of any flavor can produce the best quality computer image on a TV, having tried both HDMI and VGA on my Hisense (VGA wins hands down).

I'm perfectly content with 1080p plus SG:SSAA for now.

(03-13-2015, 08:20 AM)gstanford Wrote: You are doing it wrong then.  SG:SSAA done properly combined with a negative LOD makes games look exquisite.