Spanners
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- Mar 16, 2014
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it's only accessible if the drivers and windows all work like they should on paper , that seems a bit like a dice roll for a issue [3.5 +.5] that was created to bin more defective chip and nothing more.
some peeps seem to have problems with the last 512mb
could be funny if win 10 does not play nice.
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I'm at a lost how 970sli vs 980sli would be so useless to peeps that have paid for two cards , so whats been hidden there ?
-can't say at this short notice but reviews seem to have been vetted so far.
Seems like it'd be far better to not share between memory controllers and cut out the L2/Rops/Mem all together and save on the extra Ram.
Well, I deleted my post because I thought I was mistaken but it turns out I am not.
Pcper is not normalizing their data. Relative Variance is far greater at high than ultra on the 980. However, this is not seen on the percentile frametine chart because there is no normalization to performance.
Essentially, for a constant distribution variance with scale with magnitude. Double the value of each point in the data set and you will double the absolute variance, however they are the same data set just one is scaled. Therefore the 980 with a 20-25% advantage over the 970 will enjoy 20-25% lower frame time variances.
Think of it this way. 980 vs. 970 on ultra, 980 is 25% ahead with 25 vs 20 fps. On high the 980 is still 25% higher, 50 vs. 40 fps. The gap between the two cards has widened in terms of absolute fps yet has remained constant in terms of relative performance.
The variance graph pcper gives us is only the absolute framerate variance, not the relative framerate variance.
(The higher variance on high vs. ultra settings is likely an effect of driver granularity and game engine execution (ie player triggers some animation in the background by crossing a line).
Likewise the bf4 tests are pretty useless.
-970 better than 980 at 150% scaling.
-1 spike at 970 @ 130% is meaningless, especially when the 140% spike is smaller
You can look at the rest of the charts but the few couple spikes throw the charts right off. Which is bad because they appear to be completely random.
The variance charts also do not normalize to performance.
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Its interesting they actually observe more frame time variance in BF4 which is on Frostbite, that is known to allocate extra vram for LOD purposes which isn't required*. In such a game, I would expect no effect.
The frame time spikes should only occur in games that load the vram with textures that it needs, ie Mordor, Skyrim + Mods, Arma 3. Or now Dying Light with texture pop ins.
* Because 3GB cards run it fine, and Johan demo their dynamic vram allocation awhile ago to show LOD changes, it will adapt to your vram capacity.
I believe the problem is that the driver is oblivious to the specifics of an engine's memory allocations. It has to do with how the frostbite engine allocates memory (en masse) so it can store things that aren't in use. The drivers are unaware of certain specifics that may help it in that case so the heuristics may not be able to as easily create a more optimal layout.
Poor excuse for not doing SLI as its very likely to exacerbate the issue as those same excuses were not a problem for him when it came to finding crossfire stuttering.
From AMD for those who may want "a full 4gb card"
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...tx-970-3-5gb-vram-issue/post/4440406/#4440406
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...tx-970-3-5gb-vram-issue/post/4440406/#4440406
Wow... AMD to milk this one for what it's worth.
They really need to hit a home run with the R9 300 series if they want to get something from this.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1849838&page=21Did some more testing using Shadow of Mordor, SLI enabled and disabled, sub-3500mb and over 3500mb VRAM consumption. Frametimes stay within normal variation/acceptable consistence when in single-card mode regardless of VRAM, but going to over 3500mb in SLI causes wild and rampant stutters/hitches with vastly fluctuating frametimes to match.
Long story short, I have to agree for single-card that while it is a big false advertisement and spec change it may not have a giant practical impact (at least from what I can see so far... unless you may want to go dual-card later for example), but in SLI it is a very real and major issue.
pcper review is very good, the only thing i dont like is that they go from 4k to 4k+ res
i would like it more if they do the same testing as the reddit guy at 1080p and then going up
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tu86z/discussion_i_benchmarked_gtx_970s_in_sli_at_1440p/
and as long as NVIDIA keep updating their driver it wont be a problem
i would like it more if they do the same testing as the reddit guy at 1080p and then going up
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2tu86z/discussion_i_benchmarked_gtx_970s_in_sli_at_1440p/
and as long as NVIDIA keep updating their driver it wont be a problem
What I find revealing from HWC's testing is how the 290X just holds up better when the memory is stressed than all 3 of the nVidia cards period. Consider that HWC is far from AMD biased too. Maybe it's not just the 970 that's having issues accessing memory?
The 290X goes from being 2% faster to 17% faster than the 970
Goes from 3% to 10% faster
Goes from 11% to 30% faster
Goes from 10% to 24% faster
I every instance the performance percentage loss is less on the 290X than the three nVidia cards. And as far as the 5% not mattering, what's the big difference that makes the nVidia cards worth more money? Especially when you look at what has happened to GK110 as it's aged vs. Hawaii.
You can't magically fix everything with a driver though. At some point there will be a situation where nearly all of that 4GB of VRAM will be necessary, and having 500mb of it that is basically inaccessible without a performance hit will have an impact.
Not true. This type of marketing is everyone's concern if we don't want to see it happen again. Maybe if there is a next time it will effect those who didn't buy 970's.
Too bad a 290 is missing on thoses charts, it s still the card with the best pef/price ratio 15 months after it was released, on thoses graphs it would had fared better than the 970 when memory stressed.
The Memory spec is not the only falsehood though. The ROP's and L2 cache are pure lies. No way to try and spin that as simply accessed differently.
This solution is also pretty sleazy. Rather than come out and offer refunds to customers they say, "If you can't get one let us know and we'll try and do something on the side." Blaming it on the marketing department is pretty sad too. Like Marketing made up the specs or something. They would have obviously used the specs they were given.
It's not surprising to me, given that the 290x has a 512 bit bus and a lot more bandwidth. There's only so far that a 256 bit bus can get you, even with a massive L2 cache and third generation color compression.
The only reasons why AMD isn't an option for me right now, are the much higher power consumption and the high CPU overhead for DX11.
If it wasn't for these two issues, I'd sell my GTX 970s (or try to get a refund) and buy a single R9 290x to tide me over until GM200 and R9 300 parts start shipping..
I'm done with multi GPU. I want to move over to a single card solution desperately, but currently nothing is fast enough for 1440p max settings at the moment.
I hope AMD's 390x is really good, because that's the only way NVidia is going to be checked on their pricing.
Spanners
Senior member
- Mar 16, 2014
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I hadn't wondered that and I don't even agree that it's the case. Again though it doesn't address anything I asked in either of my posts, I'll drop it now.
Seems the 980 and 290x are trading blows when it comes to VRAM usage depending on the resolution.
That's really dependent on the engine, and how efficient it is with resources. On PCs, all of the graphics data (including textures) is stored in both VRAM and system memory.
It's the shuffling and swapping of data between these two memory pools that's responsible for a lot of the stuttering. But some engines are better at mitigating this effect than others.
Examples of engines with exceptional resource handling are CryEngine and Frostbite 3. I first played Crysis 3 on my overclocked GTX 580s with 1.5 GB of VRAM each, and my average frame rate was about 35 at max settings with 1440p. Frame rate was laggy at times, but there was no stuttering.
On the flipside, trying to play AC Unity with less than 3GB with ultra textures will lead to tons of stuttering, because the engine just has horrible resource management.
Not sure why people are making a fuss about the rops/L2. The only thing that will cause an issue is the memory segmentation.
Yup, it's not only current GTX970 owners, but also potential customers who are considering buying a GTX970 need to know this.
While I agree that the performance of the card is still there, it's longevity outlook has dimmed, and those who bought the card might have decided otherwise, because some customers don't buy only for current performance but also for the longevity potential.
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