Skip to main content

Nvidia’s GTX 970 memory woes lead to class action lawsuit

nvidias false gtx 970 advertising leads to class action suit
Image used with permission by copyright holder
While refunds may help a few hardcore gamers get on with their lives, one Andrew Ostrowski of Michigan requires over five million to excuse Nvidia for its misleading GTX 970 specifications before likely switching sides in the heated desktop GPU war.

The above named plaintiff in a recently filed lawsuit with the US District Court for the Northern District of California is seeking that colossal compensation for himself, as well as other disgruntled GTX 970 owners.

Technically, “all persons residing in the United States who purchased a graphics or video card that contains a GTX 970 GPU… since September 2014” are represented in the class action suit, and could collect a cool paycheck if Nvidia is found guilty of “uniformly marketing, advertising, selling, and disseminating information that represents the GTX 970 to have specific capabilities which it does not.”

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Gigabyte is called out to defend itself in the same case, as it’s accused of selling products based on the controversial GPU under similar false pretenses. Namely, for those of you not caught up on the news, misleading RAM count.

Though equipped with 4GB memory, as advertised, the GTX 970 partitions its memory into two modules, one 3.5GB in size, the other 512MB. This can hamper performance in games that actually need the entire 4GB.

Furthermore, and possibly more damaging for Nvidia, the number of ROPs (render output units) was erroneously listed at 64 in various publicity materials instead of the actual 56, and the L2 cache was distorted from 1.75 to 2MB.

Will the class action suit take off? That’s hard to say, but the fact it has been filed means nothing good for the green team’s attempts to patch up this PR problem.

Editors' Recommendations

Adrian Diaconescu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Adrian is a mobile aficionado since the days of the Nokia 3310, and a PC enthusiast since Windows 98. Later, he discovered…
Nvidia’s most important next-gen GPU is less than 2 weeks away
An Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card seen from the side.

Nvidia has just quietly announced the official release date of the RTX 4060. The GPU is coming out on June 29 and will be priced at $299.

Although performance-wise, the RTX 4060 can't hope to compete against some of the best graphics cards, it's still one of Nvidia's most important GPUs. Can it repeat the success of its predecessors?

Read more
Nvidia’s RTX 4060 might arrive sooner than expected
Logo on the RTX 4060 Ti graphics card.

It looks like Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4060 might arrive sooner than expected. Although initial predictions put its arrival sometime in July, Nvidia may still launch it before June is over.

With a questionable set of specifications, but a highly affordable price, will the RTX 4060 become one of this year's best GPUs?

Read more
AMD might crush Nvidia with its laptop GPUs — but it’s silent on the desktop front
A woman sits by a desk and plays a game on a laptop equipped with an AMD processor.

AMD's graphics card lineup for laptops is on the way, and by the sound of it, it's shaping up to be pretty exciting -- and it's already bigger than Team Red's current desktop range.

According to a recent leak, AMD may even be able to rival Nvidia's best desktop GPUs with its Navi 32 cards. But where are the desktop equivalents?

Read more