Nvidia has agreed to a settlement for a class action lawsuit that was brought against it for falsely advertising the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card. The lawsuit was first filed against the company in February 2015 in the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California.
Nvidia’s GTX 970 graphics card became the subject of controversy back in early 2015, where it was found to ship with a “memory problem”. More specifically, the GTX 970, that was advertised as a graphics card that has 4GB of VRAM, ended up only having 3.5GB of VRAM instead. Other complaints brought against Nvidia include falsely advertising the ROP (Render Output Processor) count and L2 cache capacity.
Technically, there is 4GB of VRAM in the GTX 970, but it has been divided into two memory segments: 3.5GB (high-speed segment) and 0.5GB (low-speed segment). Access to the low-speed segment of the graphics card is seven times slower; which rendered the 0.5GB VRAM on the GTX 970 as obsolete.
Following Nvidia’s recent settlement, the company has agreed to compensate affected GTX 970 users with US$30 (about RM120) for their troubles. Don’t get too excited yet though, it still remains unclear whether consumers outside of the U.S would be able to receive the aforementioned compensation – because this is a class action lawsuit filed in the U.S.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, about 5.05% of its total users are currently using the GTX 970, making it the most popular graphics card amongst Steam users. Previous reports from JPR (John Peddie Research) estimates the sales of the GTX 970 to surpass one million units. Knowing this, it would be one hefty price to pay for Nvidia should the company decide to compensate users outside of the U.S as well; which we believe is unlikely.
(Source: Top Class Actions via Polygon, WCCFtech, VideoCardz)
