Nvidia hit with lawsuit over misleading GTX 970 specs

Graphics card giant Nvidia has found itself in legal hot water over what it has now confirmed to be the misleading specifications it released for its GeForce GTX 970 card.

The company had marketed the card as having 4GB of video RAM. While technically this is true, it failed to mention that the memory is split into two segments – a primary 3.5GB block and a secondary 512MB one, the latter of which runs significantly slower.

Performance is fine when the card is only addressing the larger block, but when games want to access more than 3.5GB of video RAM and beginning tapping into the secondary unit, the overall performance is reduced, with reports of stutters and frame rate drops.

Anandtech also discovered that while the card was listed as having 64 render output units (ROPs), it actually only has 56. The L2 cache is also just 1.75MB, having been listed at 2MB.

All of which, PC World reports, has resulted in a lawsuit accusing it of misleading consumers. Nvidia has previously admitted to making the mistakes with its marketing materials, although it has also defended the VRAM structure saying that it should not result in any loss of performance.

It should not be forgotten that while Nvidia may have mislead with the marketing of the GTX 970, the card is still widely regarded as the best choice on the market when it comes to performance-per-pound.