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Class Action Lawsuit Against NVIDIA


Brian

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Well the inevitable has happened as a result of the GTX 970's 4 GB controversy. Someone has filed a class action lawsuit against NVIDIA and Gigabyte over deceptive marketing practices with respect to the GTX 970 alleging that they (NVIDIA) purposely marketed the card as having 4 GB Ram, 2048 KB L2 and 64 ROP when in fact it has 3.5 GB useable ram with 0.5 "spillover" and 1792 KB L2 + 56 ROPs in reality. It also states over 8100 people have filed a grievance with the FTC:

This deception has already resulted in a petition of over 8,100 purchasers who have requested that the FTC take action against Nvidia.

The lawsuit also attaches a bunch of images from NewEgg that purportedly show off advertising of 4 GB GDDR5 and other relevant technical details that they claim were misleading. Surprisingly, it doesn't allege that the card isn't a true 256 bit card in the suit, at least I couldn't find it.

Here's the link to the lawsuit: Nvidia lawsuit over GTX 970

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That class action lawsuit is only for Gigabyte it seems. Wonder if there will be others for the other manufacturers.

No it specifically names NVIDIA as a defendant.

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True, I wonder why Gigabyte was also included specifically then. And even a particular model of Gigabyte GPU within. Oh well. Going to be interesting.

Because that's the model the guy that started the suit started purchased and he was denied a refund by Newegg and Gigabyte.

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Man... I should have filed a class action lawsuit against Lenovo for marketing my Y500 as having WiDi and IRST when in reality it came with neither because of their awful feature-robbing BIOS.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit falls but either way the lawyers will get 90%+ of the money. I have a friend with 2x 970's in SLI, he hasn't had any issues but none of the games he plays will load more than 3.5GB of textures into memory, however this will change over time and people who bought these thinking that they were actually 4GB of full bandwidth are right to be upset. When you actually max these cards 4GB of RAM out (or close to max) you will see stuttering when it accessed the slower memory.

Hopefully DX12 will mitigate this by combining GPU resources instead of how current SLI/Crossfire works where the same textures needs to be loaded into each card, but this will only work for SLI setup's and will do nothing for people with single cards (the vast majority)

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  • 1 month later...
It's sad that there is no competition on the market besides Nvidia and AMD. It'd be better for customers if a third player (other than Intel) would join the GPU market.

Ya agree with you there. Seems to be only nvidia these days I've heard nothing out of AMD myself about them releasing anything. Would be nice to have a 3rd option... :S

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  • 2 weeks later...

Would be good but the start is heavy for a new company in the gpu market.

Nvidia have the opportunety to build for DX12 in corporation with microsoft.

AMD have their mantle

so a new company needs a technique like amd and nvidia have to stand their ground. Think a new reseller will have a good evolve to get the prices down for a while ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Ya agree with you there. Seems to be only nvidia these days I've heard nothing out of AMD myself about them releasing anything. Would be nice to have a 3rd option... :S

I agree, it does only seem like 1. Almost forget that AMD is in existence solely because Nvidia dominates not only with performance and reliability but most major video game makers build their games around Nvidias architecture which is why you see games running better on Nvidia cards as well as the "niche" features you get. (Like the hair FX in the witcher 3 as well as in tomb raider) Its already hard for AMD to keep up (and it doesn't really even) i don't think there would even be a possibility of another company stepping into the race. Nvidia has almost monopolized the market at this point.

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  • 10 months later...

It's not about complaining but truth and lies.

You wouldn't be happy if You would buy Mustang with V8 and later... truth comes out and it's 4 cyl EcoBoost... or in best scenario V6. 

 

Sure... allow them to lie all the time. And then You will end like the last loser (sad but true).

 

That was "cheap" marketing ploy, that won't be cheap for nVidia (I hope so).

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  • 3 weeks later...

Exactly. When we spend 200-300 bucks on a GPU we want to know we are getting what we paid for. Depending on what resolution someone does gaming at that 0.5 GB difference might be enough to force someone to have to go buy a 980 instead.

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  • 4 weeks later...
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  • 1 month later...

Glad to see people brought this to court and ended up winning. Just because they make great products doesn't mean they can flat out lie to us about specifications. My friend has a GTX 970 and he will probably be glad about this news.

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