You might remember that there has been an ongoing fiasco surrounding NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX970 video card. Users have been complaining that the advertised performance hasn’t been up to snuff. The common consensus is that not only did Nvidia originally published incorrect specifications, but it decided to remain silent even after the mistake was uncovered, making the matter worse.
Now, a class-action lawsuit has been filed in California claiming that Nvidia misled customers about the capabilities of its GTX 970. Named in the suit are NVIDIA and Giga-Byte Technology.
Filed by an Andrew Ostrowski, the complaint accuses Nvidia and Gigabyte Technology of misleading advertising, unfair business practices, unlawful business practices, and deceptive business practices. The lawsuit seeks a jury trial as well as disgorgement, restitution, injunctive relief and all the other damages and reliefs permitted under California law.
Nvidia markets the chip as having 4GB of performance-boosting video RAM, but some users have complained the chip falters after using 3.5GB of that allocation. The lawsuit says the remaining half gigabyte runs 80 percent slower than it’s supposed to. That can cause images to stutter on a high resolution screen and some games to perform poorly, according to the suit.
Responding to the issue last month, Nvidia acknowledged that the GTX 970 uses a different memory subsystem design than its higher-end GTX 980, but it said that difference has a negligible impact on performance. It has also said that, due to an error, the original specifications it published for the GTX 970 were incorrect.
Since the lawsuit is a class action one, it may be joined by other people, who believe that Nvidia and Gigabyte deceived them with the GeForce GTX 970 specifications.
