Nvidia was sued over incorrect specifications published for its GeForce GTX 970 GPU. The cards had less render output units than originally stated, and instead of 4 GB of VRAM, they had 3.5 GB and an additional 512 MB in a separate partition, (theoretically) leading to performance issues. Nvidia has agreed to a proposed settlement that would allow U.S. owners of the GTX 970 to claim $30. The settlement has not been approved by the court yet:
Word comes from Top Class Actions (via The Tech Report) that NVIDIA will soon be settling a series of proposed class action lawsuits brought against the company regarding the GeForce GTX 970. Under the preliminary settlement, United States residents who purchased GeForce GTX 970 cards would be able to claim a $30 settlement in return for dropping further litigation against the company. With the GTX 970 having launched at $329, this amounts to a de facto 9% rebate on the card.
The class action suits in question were brought against the company almost immediately after NVIDIA made the important (and more than a bit painful) disclosure that the initially published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong. Specifically, that the card had an unusual memory crossbar organization where one ROP/L2 partition was disabled, giving the card only 56 ROPs instead of 64. Furthermore, this meant that the last 512MB of the standard 4GB of VRAM could not be accessed in a contiguous manner, impacting how it could be used.
Never Settle!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:21AM
Shouldn't FTC be brought in for false advertising? The class action lawsuit only lines the lawyers' pocket.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday July 31 2016, @09:13AM
Does anyone know how these oddball bus widths are handled by the GPU? I know they've been around for a while (since the 8800 IIRC) but I have not seen an explanation yet. Is memory still organized in a linear fashion or is it interleaved somehow? How do they avoid misaligned accesses? Is the cache line size dependant on the bus width?
I heard something about the GPU having multiple memory controllers... does that mean they have separate address buses to each chip or bank of chips?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @10:18AM
All the class actions wins i've seen have been losses to the people. I would not bother to use more time and money to get these couple dollar refunds. I guess there is no justice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @12:27PM
It's only a few dollars for you but it's much more for the company, this should help them act a little bit more honest.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @01:20PM
"Muh justice." Heaven forbid anybody claim a 9% discount on what is a perfectly good GPU.