There have been a lot of talk regarding Nvidia's GTX 970 graphics card and the problems it has with memory allocation and now, Nvidia has revealed a bit more details regarding the actual GPU and why it behaves the way it does.


Sending out the diagram to PC Perspective, Nvidia explains that the GM204 GPU behind the GTX 970 is actually quite different than the GM204 GPU behind the GTX 980 graphics card.

While previously suggested that these are practically the same GPUs, which was, according to Nvidia, an error in the reviewer's guide and a misunderstanding between the engineering team and the technical PR team, the GM204 GPU behind the GTX 970 actually has less ROPs and smaller L2 cache.

As you can see from the diagram below, the GTX 970 lacks three SM blocks and single L2 cache block, which means that it actually packs 56 ROPs and 1792KB of L2 cache, while the GTX 980 packs 64 ROPs and 2048KB of L2 cache.

Yesterday, Nvidia noted that GTX 970 indeed packs 4GB of VRAM which is divided into 3.5GB and 0.5GB blocks and while Nvidia suggest that this should not be a problem, some users have been experiencing stuttering when the game uses more than 3.5GB of VRAM.

In any case, Nvidia still claims that this should not be a big of an issue, but these new details explain why the GTX 970 is actually that cheaper when compared to the GTX 980.




Source: PC Perspective.com.