Nvidia, the graphics card company, is facing legal action over the specifications of its GTX 970 GPU, which is said to perform terribly when 3.5gb or more of its VRAM are in use due to the way it was designed.
According to a report by PC World, the lawsuit was filed last week against Nvidia and GigaByte, a hardware manufacturer.
As the story goes, Nvidia's GTX 970 is advertised as having 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM, but it recently came to light that the amount is allocated into two separate units: one 3.5GB and another 512MB. The bandwidth of the latter portion is estimated to be far lower than the vast majority of the card, causing games to perform poorly when it comes into use. The bandwidth of the remaining 512MB is estimated to run at 28GB/s compared to 192GB/s of the 3.5GB.
Games that use all 4GB of memory and attempt to access the 512MB portion suffer from serious performance issues as a result of this bandwidth imbalance.
The lawsuit is seeking a jury trial and damages under California law. We expect it to last awhile, unless it gets settled out of court by Nvidia.
