Update: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Settlement Claims Website Now Open
by Ryan Smith on September 12, 2016 9:30 AM EST
Update 09/12: Bringing this back up, over the weekend the website to submit settlement claims went up. Owners of GTX 970s who purchased the card between its launch and August 24th of this year can participate in the settlement in order to receive $30 per card. The settlement itself has not yet been approved by the courts, but is expected to be approved in December.
Interestingly, there is no damage cap in the settlement, so all participants will receive a fixed $30 per card regardless of the price paid or the number of claimants. Meanwhile the proposed attorney fees total $1.3 million.
Original: 07/29
Word comes from Top Class Actions (via The Tech Report) that NVIDIA will soon be settling a series of proposed class action lawsuits brought against the company regarding the GeForce GTX 970. Under the preliminary settlement, United States residents who purchased GeForce GTX 970 cards would be able to claim a $30 settlement in return for dropping further litigation against the company. With the GTX 970 having launched at $329, this amounts to a de facto 9% rebate on the card.
The class action suits in question were brought against the company almost immediately after NVIDIA made the important (and more than a bit painful) disclosure that the initially published specifications for the GTX 970 were wrong. Specifically, that the card had an unusual memory crossbar organization where one ROP/L2 partition was disabled, giving the card only 56 ROPs instead of 64. Furthermore, this meant that the last 512MB of the standard 4GB of VRAM could not be accessed in a contiguous manner, impacting how it could be used. To that end, as the Top Class Actions article notes, the $30 settlement “was calculated to represent a portion of the cost of the storage and performance capabilities the consumers thought they were obtaining in the purchase of the product.”
With that said, at this point the settlement itself has yet to be approved by the court, and signups are not yet available. Assuming it is approved, I’d expect that signups will be made available shortly thereafter.
Source: Top Class Actions (via The Tech Report)
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just4U - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
This victory for lawyers who will pocket millions is indeed something to celebrate. You and I? meh.. here's your $30. enjoy.xenol - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
And I'm pretty sure in the legalese you won't be able to take part in another NVIDIA class action award again.(speaking from experience with all the other class action awards I was entitled to and the legalese that followed it)
bcronce - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
You don't buy a video card for what it has but what it does. If a video card claimed it had 4GiB of memory, but really only had 4MiB, but performed better than 4GiB cards while not negatively impacting my system, I would be excited, not angry. How'd they do that?!Lake Cities - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
Don't worry, they are making their $30 back when they jack the price of the reference...errr.... founders edition cards of the 10 series.Beaver M. - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
Yeah, makes you wonder if they predicted it, and thats why these are so unbelievably expensive.But as long as people pay it, they deserve all the crap Nvidia does to them.
Huber - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
how do you claim the refund if you have the card?xenol - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
It's been, what, two years and people still don't understand this issue?It's not only 3.5GB available. It's 4GB available but the GPU's memory controller has issues addressing the last 512MB x 2 chunk at the same time. Think of how the memory is divvied up like a giant RAID 0 array. It's just that you didn't have enough SATA ports but you can split the last one between two more drives at the cost of a performance hit.
Besides, it was either ship the card with this defect or ship the card with 3GB of RAM. NVIDIA didn't really have much of a positive outlook here to begin with.
Beaver M. - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Simply not true. When the remaining 512 MB are used, the frames drop, due to the extremely slow connection. Thats why the driver does everything to avoid it, yet it doesnt always work, and then you see massive slowdowns. GTA V up in the hills is a perfect example. It makes the last 512 MB unusable.Also, that wasnt their only choice. They could have simply labeled it 3.5 GB or even put out a 7 GB version. But they never even allowed that latter options to the resellers. So it was all like they wanted it to be.
webdoctors - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
Doesn't make sense to award it to everyone. Shouldn't it just be the folks between September (release) and January (acknowledgement?). Folks buying the card in Feb+ onwards knew about the updated specs and still bought it.....Does this mean I can buy it now and still get the rebate? I see some retailers selling it for <$200...with the rebate I could get it for almost $150 after cashback....very tempting.
fic2 - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
From my calculations it looks like owners are getting a 9% discount for a 12.5% reduction in ROPS and memory. They should be getting around $41. But, I guess the lawyers are getting the other $11.(I don't even know why I am reading this article and comments since I don't even have a gfx card.)