Nvidia increased the amount of L2 cache from 256 KiB on GK107 to 2 MiB on GM107, reducing the memory bandwidth needed.

Dynamic Parallelism and HyperQ, two features in GK110/GK208 GPUs, are also supported across the entire Maxwell product line.

[9] Second generation Maxwell introduced several new technologies: Dynamic Super Resolution,[13] Third Generation Delta Color Compression,[14] Multi-Pixel Programming Sampling,[15] Nvidia VXGI (Real-Time-Voxel-Global Illumination),[16] VR Direct,[17][18][19] Multi-Projection Acceleration,[14] and Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MFAA)[20] (however support for Coverage-Sampling Anti-Aliasing (CSAA) was removed).

[24] However, some of the ROPs are generally idle in the GTX 970 because there are not enough enabled SMMs to give them work to do and therefore reduces its maximum fill rate.

[31] The company then went on to promise a specific driver modification in order to alleviate the performance issues produced by the cutbacks suffered by the card.

[35] In February 2015 a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising was filed against Nvidia and Gigabyte Technology in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

[38] On July 27, 2016, Nvidia agreed to a preliminary settlement of the U.S. class action lawsuit,[36] offering a $30 refund on GTX 970 purchases.

The agreed upon refund represents the portion of the cost of the storage and performance capabilities the consumers assumed they were obtaining when they purchased the card.

[39] While the Maxwell series was marketed as fully DirectX 12 compliant,[3][40][41] Oxide Games, developer of Ashes of the Singularity, uncovered that Maxwell-based cards do not perform well when async compute is utilized.

[42][43][44][40] It appears that while this core feature is in fact exposed by the driver,[45] Nvidia partially implemented it through a driver-based shim, coming at a high performance cost.

[44] Unlike AMD's competing GCN-based graphics cards which include a full implementation of hardware-based asynchronous compute,[46][47] Nvidia planned to rely on the driver to implement a software queue and a software distributor to forward asynchronous tasks to the hardware schedulers, capable of distributing the workload to the correct units.

[49] The 3DMark Time Spy benchmark shows no noticeable performance difference between asynchronous compute being enabled or disabled.

[43] Maxwell requires that the GPU be statically partitioned for asynchronous compute to allow tasks to run concurrently.