When you buy a smartphone or tablet that says it will come with X amount of storage, but when you check and it’s actually less due to preinstalled apps plus the operating system, do you think that the company is deceiving its customers? Or do you accept that technically it’s true that it did come with X amount of storage, but some of it was used for other apps?It seems that NVIDIA found themselves in a similar legal pickle a while ago when they were hit with a class-action lawsuit over the GTX 970 GPU, which they have recently managed to settle and will be paying out affected GTX 970 customers with $30 settlements each, although it was not announced as to how customers could go about making their claims.
In case you’re a little lost about the case, basically NVIDIA marketed the GTX 970 as having 4GB of VRAM. Technically it was true, but in reality what happened is that the GPU’s VRAM was split into two: a 3.5GB portion and a 500MB portion, with the latter said to be slower. The issue is that if NVIDIA had opted for a “true” 4GB configuration, technically it could have provided better performance.
The company still denies any wrongdoing but have opted to settle the lawsuits all the same. In a statement from the lawyers who filed the suit against NVIDIA, “The settlement is fair and reasonable and falls within the range of possible approval. It is the product of extended arms-length negotiations between experienced attorneys familiar with the legal and factual issues of this case and all settlement class members are treated fairly under the terms of the settlement.”