Here's the actual thing:
people buy a box with a product in it. The box says it has specs so-and-so. The product in the box did not meet those specifications. When the product is pushed to a supported configuration called SLI, performance becomes inconsistent. Fast forward to 2018: most games require over 4GB for decent IQ settings and the 970's core can easily push that, but VRAM is now holding it back. Ever since its release, the 970 has fallen down the performance charts more rapidly than other 4GB cards. Its small, but the trend is there and you could already see single digit performance losses beyond what you'd expect shortly after it launched. When we get 2% from drivers we all download them, but when we lose 3-4% because of being misled, we don't care?? Rather odd IMO.
"The card did have 4GB on it". Do you say the same when they market a GDDR5 card and you find DDR3 on it? Because essentially, the effect of the way the die was cut, meant that one memory chip had access to bandwidth that was about as slow as system RAM. These memory setups are not new to Nvidia. They've done it with Fermi, they've done it with Kepler. But never was it such a crappy job as this one, for example, the GTX 660 had 128-bit width for 1.5GB of its memory and a 64-bit width for the remaining 0.5GB. Sound familiar? Put those in SLI and you have a stutterfest even when you underclock the core.
It was long overdue they took the fall for this. The fact you didn't see the problem doesn't mean its not there. And lo and behold: Pascal has nice, evenly cut up GPUs that handle memory b/w in a different way. But we still get 1060's with, now, over five different VRAM setups...
Regardless, my mentioning of it was a reference to how trustworthy these Nvidia statements are and how the real world works just a tad different from that.
, just tiered of every time you give a technical explanation on an issue regardless of company, somebody always plays the "fanboy" card... Get a new deck of card ffs.