Nvidia facing legal action over misleading GTX 970 specs

Nvidia is facing a class action lawsuit as a result of "misleading consumers" with the specifications of the GTX 970 GPU.

According to a report by PC World, the lawsuit was filed last Thursday against Nvidia and Giga-Byte, a graphics card manufacturer.

The issue that resulted in the filing of this lawsuit has been a point of contention over the past few weeks. Nvidia advertises the GTX 970 as having 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM and it recently came to light that the amount is allocated into two chunks, one 3.5GB and another 512MB. The bandwidth of the 512MB portion is estimated to be far lower than that of the 3.5GB portion, or 28GB/s versus 192GB/s.

This causes all sorts of stuttering and other issues whenever a game tries to access the VRAM beyond the 3.5GB portion, effectively rendering that portion unusable and the advertised specs false. Ramifications of this vary wildly depending on the game and the resolution, but it's generally more noticeable in resolutions higher than 1440p.

The lawsuit is seeking jury trial and damages under California law. A judge will decide whether it can proceed as a class action suit.