With Nvidia customers still fuming about the misleading specs of the GeForce GTX 970, along with a recent lawsuit filing against Nvidia, the company’s president and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, posted an open letter explaining the miscommunication within the company and apologizing to customers.
In the eyes of the consumer, the biggest issue with the GTX 970 was the memory, which some believe is misleading because the advertised capacity was 4 GB but was really 3.5 GB, with the final 512 MB of memory segmented with a smaller bandwidth.
Huang said that the split in memory was the company’s new memory architecture and was created to give reduced configurations of Maxwell a larger frame buffer.
“This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1 GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512 MB segment,” he said.
But what happened between Nvidia’s engineering and marketing division was a failure to communicate. By not relaying the specifics of the video memory to marketing, and thus to reviewers, customers were then misled about how the 4 GB of memory was actually implemented on the card. Huang wanted people to be excited about the 970, but the miscommunication resulted in frustrated and angry customers.
As Nvidia moves forward after this incident, Huang assured customers that features will be “clearly detailed from the beginning,” and he said that the company “won’t let this happen again.” Hopefully, its efforts will be enough to regain the trust of old customers.
