In a statement published on the company's blog site on Feb. 24, Nvidia's president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang apologized to millions of Nvidia users, addressing the controversy surrounding the release of its GeForce GTX 970 video cards.
Earlier this year, Nvidia launched the newest graphics card on its arsenal, the GeForce GTX 970. However, erroneous specifications were posted on the its product page. The architecture of the new card is segmented, which was not clearly stated to — and by — the company's marketing team. Coupled with minor glitches, buyers were up in arms and demanded an explanation. Some even returned their products, which retailers, especially in the European Union, had to accept to honor false advertisement laws.
In this statement, Huang clarified the issue and made an indirect apology.
As for the new design, he said, "GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment."
He further stated, "The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience. This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning. We won't let this happen again. We'll do a better job next time."
Meanwhile, a tweet by Roy Taylor, Corporate Vice President IPG at rival company AMD, has been making the rounds and has already gone viral on Reddit. In the tweet, Taylor is offering special discounts to those who would return their Nvidia GTX 970 cards and purchase AMD's Radeon 4GB video cards.
