Nvidia Boss Responds to GTX 970 "False Advertising" Claims

Nvidia's chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang has responded to criticisms over the company's description of its GTX 970 GPU, saying that his company will "do a better job next time."

The statement (which you can read in full over on Nvidia's official blog), follows claims that the GTX 970 was falsely advertised due to incorrect technical specifications provided to the press. These claims were corroborated by video recordings of performance problems in games that use over 3.5GB of the GPU's VRAM.

While not going as far as an apology, Huang's statement does explain that "instead of being excited" that the company had "invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn't better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory."

The statement goes on to reiterate some of the design decisions behind the GTX 970, the bulk of which have been previously addressed by Nvidia's Senior VP of GPU Engineering Jonah Alben.

"We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell", reads the statement. "This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer--i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB."

"GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment. Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch."

"This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning. We won't let this happen again. We'll do a better job next time."

Nvidia has been slapped with a class action lawsuit for allegedly falsely advertising the GTX 970. The corporation is accused of having "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers about the characteristics, qualities, and benefits of the GTX 970." The suit seeks an injunction against Nvidia, plus legal fees and full refunds, for those who purchased the card. Plaintiffs also seek restitution.

While the lawsuit and GTX 970 issues are a current cause for concern for Nvidia, it hasn't been suffering financially. In it's latest financial report (covering the three month sales period between November and January), the company reported "record" sales for its Maxwell-based graphics cards, pulling in $1.25 billion in revenue for the quarter, and close to $5 billion in revenue for the year.