Nvidias vd kallar minneslösningen i GTX 970 en “feature” i öppet brev

Efter veckor av tung kritik från konsumenter och stämningsansökningar lurandes runt hörnet väljer Nvidias vd Jen-Hsun Huang att publicera ett öppet brev till alla inblandade. Brevet är en blandning av förklaringar och förtydlingar kring lanseringen av GTX 970 samtidigt som Jen-Hsun lovar att ett liknande missförstånd inte kommer att ske igen.

Merparten av brevet som publicerats på Nvidias hemsida vigs åt att förklara designfilosifin bakom Maxwell-arkitekturens minneskonfiguration samtidigt som det hela framställs som en feature snarare än ett problem. En feature som Jen-Hsun Huang medger skulle förmedlats tydligare till konsumenter och att ett liknande missförstånd inte kommer att ske igen.

Hey everyone,

Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.

We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.

GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.

Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.

Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.

Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.

This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.

The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.

This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.

We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.

Jen-Hsun

Mer information om minnesbegränsningarna i Geforce GTX 970 finnas att hitta i våra tidigare artiklar kring ämnet men kretsar kring dess 4 gigabyte minnesbuffert där 512 megabyte av dessa har en bråkdel av den bandbredd som övriga 3,5 gigabyte minne kan erbjuda. En tydlig skillnad mot GTX 980 som inte deklarerades vid lanseringen av de båda grafikkorten.

Källa: Nvidia

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