A Maryland man filed a class-action suit alleging a California technology company lied to consumers about the amount of memory one of its graphics and video cards contained.
Stephen Lowe filed the lawsuit March 9 in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland against Nvidia Corp. claiming its advertisements for the GeForce GTX 970 graphics processing unit were misleading in terms of the amount of storage memory on the product.
Nvidia claimed the GTX 970 had a 4 gigabyte “pool of video random access memory, 64 raster operations pipelines and 2,048 kilobytes of L2 cache capacity” the lawsuit said. However, the product was actually split in two separate pools of memory.
The first “high performance” pool contained about 3.5 gigabytes of memory, and “a second nearly unusable pool” had about 0.5 gigabytes of memory. The two-pool system was misleading and deceiving to consumers, the lawsuit said.
A petition signed by approximately 10,000 people have signed a petition seeking refunds from Nvidia over the storage capacity of the GTX 970, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status for all those who purchased the GTX 970. The suit seeks damages of more than $5 million plus court costs.
Lowe is represented by Gary E. Mason, Esfand Y. Nafisi and Benjamin S. Branda of Whitfield Bryson & Mason, LLP, in Washington, D.C., and Charles J. LaDuca and Brendan S. Thompson of Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, LLP, in Bethesda, Maryland.
U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Baltimore Division; case number 1:15-cv-00660.