On forums near and far, there have been reports users have been experiencing memory allocation issues on NVIDIA's GTX 970. Much of this centered around the fact that certain applications showed the GTX 970 to be utilizing just 3.5GB of its supposed 4GB of memory even though the GTX 980 and other cards showed their full memory layout as being accessible. There were further reports that once the 3.5GB threshold was surpassed, the GTX 970 suddenly exhibited a drastic loss of performance. It looked suspiciously like NVIDIA's price / performance darling wasn't able to physically communicate with its advertised memory allotment and if communication was taking place, that bandwidth was somehow truncated.

Naturally, this sparked a large number of theories regarding the Maxwell architecture, its abilities and how NVIDIA has allocated resources on their $350 graphics card. NVIDIA themselves have now stepped in, trying to set the record straight. What follows is a simplified version of our technical briefing with them alongside some basic benchmarks.