Nvidia: Little performance drop in GTX 970 at high memory usage

Nvidia claims that there is only slightly more performance drop when the GTX 970 uses a lot of memory compared to the GTX 980. Users have complained about the performance drop when the video card hits its 4GB limit.

According to figures quoted by Nvidia itself, and published by Anandtech, if the GTX 970 uses more than 3.5GB, the drop in performance is slightly higher than the GTX 980, but the difference is small. For example, according to Nvidia itself, in Battlefield 4, with higher settings so that both video cards are near the 4GB limit, the frame rate drops 50 percent with the GTX 970 and 47 percent with the GTX 980. “As you can see, there is little difference in the performance of the GTX 970 when compared to the 980,” the company said.

The vram of the 970 is divided into segments of 3.5GB and 0.5GB. The 970 uses the latter 0.5GB only when needed, as it hinders performance. Users had complained about this, but according to the manufacturer there is not really a big problem. Anandtech notes that Nvidia is actually explaining little about the issue itself and expects another statement from Nvidia on the issue.