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Captain_Tom on 25 January 2015
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vivster said:
Protendo said:
It looks like this affects all units even the ones with Samsung memory. Hopefully it's a driver error. Once games use 4 GB which is expected to start happening next year these cards are going to have abysmal performance to the point of being unplayable. It's fine for now but once games use 4GB, these cards will be in trouble. So if you are thinking about buying one either wait for a revision or wait and see what AMD has in store for us.

Read the first article where Nvidia explains it. It's not a driver error. It's the design of the chip. The last 0.5GB of RAM have their own partition which the GPU cannot access as efficiently as the first partition with 3.5GB. So this only ever occurs with games that use more than 3.5GB of VRAM. Still bad design though.

Makes me feel good in my hardware approach. Either go big or go home. 980 doesn't have this issue.

Also your assumption that by next year games will use much more RAM is false. Reaching 3.5GB of VRAM isn't that easy unless you go 4k. And for 4k the 970 isn't fast enough anyway.

There are games that use over 3GB of RAM in 1080p NOW.  What do you think it will be like in 1-2 years?  The 970 started as a card that rivaled the 290X with 4GB of VRAM, and now the 290 is already starting to beat it and it really only has 3.3 GB.  It isn't aging well, and it is only going to get worse.