Some users decide to return their gtx 970 alleging misleading nvidia advertising

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 has problems when it comes to using its 4 Gb of VRAM since after passing 3.5 GB it begins to have performance drops due to poor memory management, this has caused discontent in some users, they feel cheated by Nvidia and have decided to return their cards.

Faced with the problem of the GTX 970 to use its 4 GB of VRAM, some European users have decided to return their cards alleging misleading advertising by Nvidia by not specifying the difficulty of the card to use all its available video memory. European Union law says that if retailers are unable to repair product defects, they must either refund the amount to buyers or exchange the product for a higher model (GTX 980) with the consumer paying the price difference.

On the other hand, Nvidia plans to solve the problem with an update in its drivers to improve the way the GTX 970 uses its video memory, it could be achieved by reactivating GPU components that have been deactivated with respect to the GTX 980 and that have originated problems in the use of VRAM. Despite this drawback, let's not forget that the GTX 970 offers excellent performance, approaching in some cases the GTX 780 Ti, with a very moderate power consumption, but it is true that Nvidia was not initially honest with the specifications of the card, although then if they have honestly corrected it.

In the previous image it is observed that the specifications announced by Nvidia of the GTX 970 do not correspond to its real specifications, specifically the L2 cache is smaller than what was officially said (1.75 MB vs 2 MB) and the amount of ROP units is also lower (56 ROPs vs. 64 ROPs). These differences are due to the fact that elements in your GPU have been deactivated compared to the GTX 980 and are the ones that cause the problem when using more than 3.5 GB of VRAM.

Source: techpowerup