The launch of the GeForce GTX 970 wasn't one of the happiest for Nvidia. This graphics card placed the green giant of Santa Clara in the middle of a media storm that revealed wrong specifications, performance loss, and accusations of false advertising, among other things. In an attempt to leave this bitter episode behind and cut losses, Nvidia accepted a preliminary agreement under which it will pay 30 dollars to each owner of a GeForce GTX 970, and cover the 1.3 million dollars accumulated in legal costs.
Many owners of the GeForce GTX 970 have said that despite the differences in specifications and the technical detail of segmentation in its memory, it turned out to be a decent graphics card. After all, it's not even two years old, and it has no problem running the latest games... assuming they don't require the full 4 GB of memory. The massive performance loss in accessing the last 512 megabytes, the reduced L2 cache, and a lower number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) were more than enough reasons for several lawsuits to be filed in February 2015 with charges of false advertising, illegal practices, and violations of commerce law in the state of California, to name three of them.
The Settlement
18 months later after this scandal crossed the Web from end to end, Nvidia finally reached an agreement. First, the company will pay each owner of a GTX 970 the sum of 30 dollars, calculated from the differences between the published specifications and those consumers received with the hardware purchase. And second, the manufacturer will take care of all legal and administrative expenses, which already reached 1.3 million dollars. The agreement is preliminary, so it needs formal approval, but everything seems to indicate that both parties will give the green light, especially if we take into account the detail that Nvidia will be able to continue denying any accusation and declare that it had no bad intentions.
Remaining Issues
There are still many aspects to resolve, starting with the fact that consumers will have to file a claim (whose mechanism is not yet known) and proof of purchase to access those 30 dollars. Furthermore, the agreement appears to be limited to US territory, but owners of the card in other regions of the globe might want to stay alert just in case.
