Nvidia is being hit with a class action lawsuit by gamers who say that the company misled them by falsely advertising the hardware power in the GTX 970 graphics card.
The graphics card was released late last year with an advertised 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM. However, users are reporting games crashing and stuttering when they tried to use the GPU. This is because the memor is divided into two separate chunks: 3.5GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 500MB that runs much slower. This division has caused diminished performance in games and has led to crashes. The biggest issue, however, is that the card has fewer render output units (ROPs), and less L2 cache than advertised.
"Based on the above, Plaintiff and the Class were sold products that do not perform or possess the capabilities advertised and represented," says the suit. "As such, they should be provided appropriate relief, as all consumers who purchased a GTX 970 device have been injured by Defendants' wrongful conduct, as they did not receive the product they paid for in terms of possessing the characteristics set forth above."
This is not the first time that Nvidia has landed in legal trouble. In 2011, a court combined multiple class action suits into one case that was called the "Nvidia GPU Litigation." Nvidia was essentially accused of supplying faulty graphics cards, and eventually agreed to replace the chips or reimburse customers who had already spent money to get their laptops repaired. The chips were mainly found in Dell and HP laptops, as well as in Apple's MacBook Pro.
Nvidia has also been involved with legal disputes with Intel. However, the two companies signed a six-year cross-licensing agreement that meant that they would end any legal dispute between themselves. As part of the agreement, Intel agreed to pay Nvidia $1.5 billion in five annual payments.
Nvidia also filed a patent infringement lawsuit against none other than Samsung and Qualcomm last year, insisting that both companies have been using Nvidia's GPU-related intellectual property over the past couple of years, and that neither company has paid proper compensation for the use.
After the lawsuit was filed, Samsung filed a counter-lawsuit against Nvidia in order to allow Samsung to keep the lawsuit in Virginia, which has a faster time to trial than many other courts in the U.S. Samsung then went the extra mile and filed another counter-suit with the International Trade Commission, dragging a number of Nvidia partners into the battle. Many of these partners had nothing to do with the cases.
In the new case, the plaintiffs are seeking corrective advertising or a full refund for the chips that they purchased, but some retailers are reportedly offering refunds to customers already. AMD, a competitor to Nvidia, is taking advantage of the situation by offering discounts on its GPU cards to customers who return their Nvidia GTX 970.
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