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.”
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.
