Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 owners are still fuming about the company's misinterpretation of the actual specs of the graphics card as it was stated on release. One specific customer took the next step against the company last week in the form of filing a lawsuit.
The plaintiff, a Michigan resident named Andrew Ostrowski, is suing the company on the basis that Nvidia misled customers about the actual specs of the GTX 970 and also concealed facts about the real specs of the graphics card itself. Ostroswski is also suing Gigabyte because he bought two of the company's GTX 970s, and it advertised the same specs as Nvidia at the time, specifically on the memory capacity.
The lawsuit is based on the specs sent to reviewers in terms of the memory capacity (4 GB), number of ROPs (64), and the capacity of the L2 cache (2 MB). However, the memory was split between 3.5 GB and 512 MB, the number of ROPs was actually 56, and the L2 cache had a smaller capacity of 1.75 MB.
In a recent post concerning the actual specs of the GTX 970, we found that even though the memory is split in two segments of 3.5 GB and 512 MB, with a memory bandwidth of 196 GB/s and 28 GB/s, respectively, it still contains the 4 GB of memory as advertised. However, the ROP count is actually 56 as opposed to the advertised 64, and the L2 cache has a capacity of 1.75 MB despite Nvidia claiming it was 2 MB.
While Ostrowski is the main plaintiff in the lawsuit, he also represents other customers in the same situation. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, which has jurisdiction over the case due to the criteria of U.S. Code, Section 1332(d) which requires that the "amount in controversy" to be more than $5 million exclusive of interest and costs, that there are more than 100 plaintiffs represented, and that the plaintiffs reside in different states.
The court has additional jurisdiction under U.S. Code, Section 1332(a), because the amount in controversy is over $75,000 and the plaintiffs are from different states. The last part of that criteria is important, because if the lawsuit goes through and Nvidia and Gigabyte are found guilty, then both companies will have to pay customers a large sum of money for the misleading specs.
In any case, the controversy has already put Nvidia in a bad light, and it might take some time for the company to regain the trust of its once-loyal customers.
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