If you haven’t heard the news back in January, 2015, there were major complaints from consumers for Nvidia’s GTX 970 regarding its performance. While Nvidia tried their best to explain and fix what went wrong and avoid repercussions, none were effective. So what was once thought as an advertising error and a redeemable flaw has now turned into a lawsuit.
To recap what just happened a few months back, Nvidia had advertised their GTX 970 to having a 4GB Vram which was of course monitored by lots of experts and was exposed as providing only a portion of the Vram which was 3.5GB. Although it was still a reasonable amount, a .5 GB was still missing and GTX 970 was facing memory allocation issues. You can read more here.
How will the nVidia lawsuit affect consumers?
Andrew Ostrowski is filing a class-action complaint against Nvidia and Gigabyte for misleading consumers nationwide about their false advertisement. What Ostrowski wants is for the court to award disgorgement, restitution and an order that the defendants (Nvidia and Gigabyte) engage in a corrective advertising or full refund campaign.
This would mean that consumers world-wide, if awarded, would have the chance of a full refund on their GTX 970. Probably a hard feat to implement, but it would really mean a lot for those who really wanted every inch of that 4GB Vram, especially now that technology is requiring more and more from us. Although, as mentioned by Peter, an employee for Nvidia in Santa Clara:
“I understand that this whole experience might have turned you off to the card. If you don’t want the card anymore you should return it and get a refund or exchange. If you have any problems getting that done, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.”
So that would mean consumers can still cash in on their GTX 970 anyway as long as the product is not altered in any way. And you heard it from Peter, you can just let him know if problem arise. I only hope it applies to all consumers worldwide.
Thoughts
Since Nvidia Disclosed the full memory structure and limitations of GTX 970, it sparked a couple of debates but only a few can deny that it is still a reasonable card for its price. Even so, Nvidia admits they messed up and now their notable competitor AMD is taunting them by having a slogan of their own stating “4GB means 4GB” and having their own R9 290x prices drop. Now that’s advertising.
