The GTX 980 Ti release date could be delayed after a huge VRAM issue affecting the 900 series cards has been detected.
Reports suggest that Nvidia is looking to fix the recently discovered GTX 970 VRAM issue and that would cause them to delay the development of the GTX 980 Ti.
In a report by SwePCGamers, Nvidia is aware of the GTX 970 VRAM issue and that while they say that gamers are getting the situation a bit twisted, they are going to help all the GTX 970 and that they promise that users would experience the GTX 970 the way it was meant to be experienced. This means that they would allocate a huge part of their team to handling this issue and it would cause the development of some of the other Nvidia projects to slow down.
If you are not familiar with the GTX 970 VRAM issue, here's a crash course about what that is.
As was reported by DSO Gaming, the GTX 970 is unable to efficiently use more than 3.5GB of VRAM.
Guru3D member 'Milan' tested both a GTX 980 and GTX 970 in a number of games, and was the first one reporting this awkward behavior. The repor says that the GTX 970 was allocating 3.5GB of VRAM in most recent games such as Far Cry 4, Crysis 3 and Watch_Dogs whereas the GTX 980 was using 4GB of VRAM in the same scenes with the exact same settings.
'aufkrawall2′ of Guru3D also notes that:
"Once more than 3.5GB gets allocated, there is a huge frametime spike. The same scene can be tested to get reproducible results. In 4k, memory usage stays below 3.5GB and there is no extreme spike. But in 5k (4x DSR with 1440p), at the same scene, there is a huge fps drop once the game wants to allocate 2-300MB at once and burst the 3.5GB. It happens in the tutorial mission when encountering the tennis field. With older driver (344.11 instead of 347.09), memory usage is lower, but you can enable MSAA to get high VRAM usage and thus be able to reproduce by 100%."
With a problem that potentially plagues all GTX 970 owners, it is no doubt that Nvidia has their hands full and that until this issue is resolved, the GTX 980 Ti may have to wait.
