No. The reason it affects the 970 is because it's missing some of the hardware that's in the 980.

It does work. There's 4GB of RAM. It's fully usable. It's just slower. Just like my laptop.

So are you saying I should be suing Toshiba because the top 2GB of RAM in my laptop is half the speed of the bottom 4GB?

And note that the actual frame-rate tests I've seen show only a few percent difference, because you'll rarely be accessing data in that upper 512MB. You need artificial tests to make it run drastically slower.

They were promised 4GB. They got 4GB. Complaining that 0.5GB of that runs slow is like complaining that 2GB of the 6GB in my laptop runs at half the speed of the other 4GB.

The only valid complaint they have is that Nvidia said it had 64 ROPs when it only has 56. That's not really something worth a lawsuit, when, as I understand it, the chip isn't capable of generating pixels fast enough to make use of 64.

As I said above, the only people who will really benefit from this are lawyers.

Lawyers?

They'll make a few million, and all the GTX970 owners will get a $5 discount coupon off their next Nvidia card.

Very few mass-market technologies become more expensive over time. Plastic printers were expensive not long ago. They're not any more.

And will, in technological time, soon be cheap enough for everyone to have one.

You seem to believe it's somehow different in other countries.

It does have relatively high crime rates (just not murder), and those rates were significantly lower when gun ownership was common and anyone could carry one so long as they had ten shillings to pay for a license.

Ah, an optimist, I see. 'Agitating for access to the technology' would inevitably result in eliminating most of the government and business in that country, and they will fight that to the bitter end. Big Business and Big Government just don't work in a world where anyone can make anything they want at any time.

I think it's far more likely that most of the West will ban it, until their economies collapse as other nations that don't have the same industrial baggage overtake them.

High quality, high detail 3D printing of metals and other materials will be banned, because 'public safety!' After all, evil people COULD PRINT GUNS!

Seriously, governments are going to do everything they can to restrict this technology, because the ability to make anything you want at home would destroy the entire economic and political system. How can Big Business make money if anyone can print stuff? How can Big Government regulate things if anyone can just print them?

Or you can pay the government to pass a law banning the cheap alternatives because 'public safety!', which is usually much cheaper. This is exactly what's likely to happen with, say, people printing new car parts on a 3D printer. Clearly that's a risk to 'public safety!' because those parts haven't been tested like the real parts. And as for printing complete cars that haven't been crash-tested and may not meet CAFE standards...

Yes, of course, because technology doesn't improve and get cheaper. No, no, no.

i remember when the first personal computers came out, people would buy them and everyone else would ask why they did that, because what could you do on them other than play some game where you had to guide the asterisk to avoid the evil dollar signs? What a silly toy.

Then, today, few people could imagine living without one.

Why? Do you think some random stranger was going to report them to the Imaginary Property Police?

I doubt you'll find one random stranger in a thousand who thinks there's anything wrong with what this guy is doing, and they probably work for the Imaginary Property industry.

1. Designs change to match production ability. If you can't print a boat in one piece, you print it in multiple pieces and fit them together. Just like you didn't make a wooden galleon out of one tree trunk. My guess is that future 3D-printed boats will look very little like current designs.

2. You don't need the printer in your garage, you design the boat on your computer, then email the design to your local print shop to print out the parts for you. Unless the Imaginary Property Barons managed to get in the way and stop you because they have a patent on 'Making Things That Float... Using A 3D Printer'.

And, yes, it will prove to be one of the biggest revolutions in the history of the human race. In particular, it's pretty much required to enable us to finally get off this planet and live elsewhere; no-one's going to want to ship a boat to Titan if they can print one there instead.

But if you could print a replacement for that cheap plastic part that breaks every couple of years so you have to go out and spend $100 on replacing the entire Widget, the Widget-makers would go out of business!

There are probably fifteen patents on that part.

Think of the patent holders, dude!

This article just goes to show how insanely stupid the whole Imaginary Property industry is. We have to cripple one of the most useful inventions in the history of the world, that has the potential to help raise billions out of poverty, just so a rentier class can make money.