The GTX970 is a fun bit of hardware. It's marketed as a 4GB RAM card.
In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.
I owned the 970 for 7+ years and I remember all about that bruahaha.
I also remember that the card was incredibly reliable and hasn't shown those promised performance dropoffs of "useless last 512MB" of VRAM and still performs well even for some 1440p workloads to this day.
It's been one of the best hardware purchases I've made over the years, which is why I'm also very sceptical of this screaming about the 12GB 4080 model. None of us who bought the GTX970 got "more inferior product" that what we thought - we got exactly what we've seen in benchmarks.
And I bet it would be the same with buyers of those 4080s - they'd get a cheaper, slightly slower model and it would perform just like the reviews and benchmarks promised. The whole drama is just about the... number on the box?
I am still owning a GTX970, one of the fans has failed (but then that's just aging), and the last 512MB is awful. Main memory operates at 192Gbps,last block at 28Gbps. It is easily felt, and most GTX970 owners explicitly tried to not use that memory, especially on games that swap assets often (open world games are deadly)
The last 512MB bit was mentioned nowhere in benchmarks or marketing material, until people realised something was wrong and nvidia said "teehee woopsies"
I'd love to hear any kind of citation about this "avoiding of last 512MB", because after the initial screaming, the issue kinda disappeared and pretty much every open-world game I threw at it ran just fine on High @ 1080p (or even 1440p in many cases).
Sure, the numbers in benchmarks do drop off, but what was the actual effect when you ran an actual game on it? I never had to "avoid" anything and haven't really seen any notes about doing that outside the benchmark readers.
In practice, it's 3.5GB of normal GDDR4, and 512 MB of horribly slow, would have been considered bad in 2000 RAM. So, people who bought it thinking they're getting a less powerful GTX980 get more inferior product than they bought. The last 512Mb is truly worthless, only good for storing a desktop framebuffer. Anything that needs to write into it quickly (like, say, literally any game) will just slow down to a crawl.