The Geforce GTX 970 is powered by a memory bug

With class-leading performance for the money, the Geforce GTX 970 is one of the absolute best-selling graphics cards on the market today, but not everything is gold and green forests. Now there are reports that the model is drawn with an odd and potentially serious bug related to the management of the graphics card’s video memory.

At Guru3D, among others, a bunch of enthusiasts discover that the Geforce GTX 970 encounters problems if applications allocate more than about 3.3 GB of video memory. In the remaining address space, the bandwidth is for some reason only a fraction of normal, which can cause everything from sudden freezes to jerky image and uneven frame rate.

Exactly what causes the concern is not determined, although there is plenty of speculation circulating online. The situation is also not clear that the sibling Geforce GTX 980, with almost identical memory configuration, exhibits fully normal transfer speeds in the affected memory range.

In SweClocker’s forum, the discussion about the latest discoveries is currently underway. The editors are looking for Nvidia for a comment.

Update

► Nvidia responds in an official statement. According to the graphics card maker, however, this is not a bug but a limitation in the hardware.