Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 suffers from performance issues with high memory consumption

Users of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 will encounter problems when using more than 3.5GB of vram. Then the performance drops quickly, according to the users. It is not yet clear what is causing the problem.

On various user forums, including Overclock.net, users are reporting performance issues. The GeForce GTX 970 has a total of 4GB of vram, but according to users, it cannot be fully utilized. The last block of 500MB of vram would cause problems. Users report that performance drops significantly, for example in games, when more than 3.5GB of vram is used.

Benchmarks collected by ExtremeTech show how performance decreases as the amount of vram used approaches 4GB. Comparable benchmarks done with the GTX 980 show that the problems do not occur there. So the memory bug seems to be isolated to the 970 model, but it’s also not clear if the issues affect all users.

It is not yet clear what caused the memory bug. Nvidia has said it will study the issue, but it is unknown if the issue will be resolved.