PC gamers may often consider themselves the gaming elite and they often are, factually speaking, in possession of far superior gaming equipment. However, the high end equipment is constantly evolving and that of course has inherent problems, such as missing bugs and issues in testing.
Users of NVIDIA’s GTX 970 are reporting problems with VRAM allocation, it would seem there’s a problem at the moment that prevents users from efficiently allocating more than 3.5GB’s at a time. The problem isn’t an isolated case either after it was proven to be easily replicated. Guru3D’s Milan ran a comparison test between the GTX980 and GTX970 and found that the 970 was setting 3.5GB of VRAM on some recent AAA games whereas the 980 was using 4GB of VRAM in the same scenario and with the same settings.
The same results have been reported by other 970 users who benchmarked their own games and found their results to be the same. It’s not quite clear what’s going to happen from here given that both cards are supposed to support 4GB of VRAM by default. NVIDIA have got some work to do.
[Source]