Got mine today from NewEgg. Sure enough, only using 3.5GB of the VRAM. This offered a bit of catharsis though:
Regardless, it is still just about the fastest card on the market, and has the best price/performance.
Agree, and I found some hard data on the issue: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation Looks like it's there physically, just not in an optimized configuration. "According to NVIDIA, the whole issue is due to a miscommunication between various departments regarding the GTX 970 architecture. The GTX 970 doesn’t come with the same ROPs and L2 cache as the flagship GTX 980 card. The GTX 970 comes with 56 ROPs and a maximum 1792KB of L2 cache. In comparison, the GTX 980 card comes with 64 ROPs and 2048KB L2 cache. It is due to the reduced ROPs over the GTX 980 that the GTX 970 memory subsystem cannot handle more than 3.5GB VRAM at once. The 4GB of VRAM that the GTX 970 comes with is split into two different segments of 3.5GB and 512MB each. For most games, the card only uses the 3.5GB segment that also happens to be much faster. The slower 512MB segment is used only when a game requires more than 3.5GB of memory. However, since the secondary memory segment is slower, it results in a performance loss."
Thanks Skwi, didn't see this one. I'm glad they're fixing it/working around it. I was disappointed because the 4GB was a selling point for me. I play on a 1440p monitor and I really was hoping it would push 4k texture packs for Skyrim and such.
So kinda related but not really, I'm having a problem since I installed my 970 and haven't found anything about it. Whenever I log on to the SC website, as soon as the header video loads my monitor blacks out for a second then comes back. It's fine until the next video rotates and loads, then it does the same thing. Occasionally it will happen at random on other websites with embedded video but that's the only site I know that does it consistently. I'm running the latest NVidia drivers, I've tried some searching but can't find any topics similar to what I'm experiencing. Everything is fine in any games I've played, no blackouts or problems there even with some more graphically intensive games like Shadow of Mordor and Arena Commander. Any ideas? I didn't have this problem until I swapped video cards. Browser is Firefox 35.0.1, already tried clearing cache with no effect.
"I really like my 970 and it's working perfectly for me and it is perfectest card in a wrold and you are all liers!" Sorry to hear about your problems. I don't even have a full hd monitor on me and I don't yet own modern AAA games so it hasn't been an issue.. Or in other words "it runs Windows just fine".
Derak you're a genius. I'd already updated my Flash player and was driving myself crazy trying to hunt down and delete old AMD drivers but I never thought to make sure Java was updated. Updated from Java 8.25 to Java 8.31 in both 32 and 64 bit and that took care of it!
