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My GPU wasn’t hitting its advertised clock speeds - here’s how I fixed it
My GPU wasn’t hitting its advertised clock speeds - here’s how I fixed it
On every GPU box, you'll find a core clock and a boost clock, and these are the numbers your GPU should be able to reach out of the box. If you've ever monitored your GPU while gaming or benchmarking, you may have noticed that those numbers aren't always what you get.
This was the case with my RX 9070 XT under certain conditions. Despite sitting at 100% usage and being kept cool, the clock speed wouldn't really come close to the advertised boost on the box. The solution for me was a quick undervolt, but there are other reasons for low clock speed on a GPU, and most of them are pretty easy to fix.
My clock speed situation
Certain loads wouldn't clock the GPU very high
I started noticing this while running a mix of games and synthetic benchmarks. The RX 9070 XT is supposed to boost past 3 GHz under heavy load, but mine would stubbornly hover around 2.6 GHz or lower. GPU usage was consistently high, and frame rates were great, but I was curious as to why it wasn't boosting the way it should.
The first suspect was heat, but temperatures were never a problem; the card topped out in the mid-60 Celcius range, even after long sessions, and wouldn't ever touch above 70, which is still well below the temperature limit. Power draw, however, was lower than expected, which told me the GPU wasn’t fully stretching its legs. Both Radeon and Nvidia graphics cards use an adaptive voltage/frequency curve that balances efficiency, thermals, and power. If that curve is slightly conservative out of the box, or if power limits are too tight, the GPU might simply decide that 2.5 GHz is the sweet spot and stay there.
The Sapphire NITRO+ I have in my rig should be fairly good at maintaining its boost clock, since it's a premium model with higher-than-normal game and boost clocks out of the box, with both being higher by about 100 MHz. The cooler is also beefy, taking up 3 slots with a flow-through area at one end.
What I did to boost my clock speeds
A modest undervolt can go a long way
In AMD's Adrenalin software I made a couple of small changes to my GPU's behavior to reach the advertised boost clock. Depending on which GPU you have, you should be able to access most of these settings through that, or through MSI Afterburner.
I navigated to theTuningtab that's underPerformance, and enabled custom tuning control. From here, I enabled GPU Tuning and applied a modest-50mV Voltage Offset. What this does is adjust the voltage curve by -50mV across the GPU for all frequencies. I then enabled Power Tuning and increased the power limit to10%. Both of these changes should allow my GPU to boost higher than it did before. Because my voltage offset decreases the voltage is required to reach the same frequencies, if I then increase the power limit, my GPU should be able to boost to much higher frequencies than before.
The results were immediate
The numbers were much more in line with what you'd expect
My boost clocks were now much more in line with what is advertised on the box, in both synthetic load and in gaming. By tuning the voltage offset even more, I saw even bigger gains in clock speed, with my max offset being around -80mV before I started seeing instability. Everyone's card will be a little different in terms of how it reacts to an undervolt, but it could also be the case that something else entirely is hampering your card's clocks.
Your problem could be different
Thermals, the type of load, and voltage all play a part
The clock speeds you might be seeing depend on many different factors, not just voltage. Undervolting can address overheating in addition to a conservative voltage curve, but the problem could just be the type of load, which isn't a problem at all. Some GPU loads just don't stress your GPU in the same ways as others do. Some games and synthetics might not make your GPU clock itself higher, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about that.
If you're seeing poor clock speeds and high temperatures, fortunately, that's a relatively easy combination to diagnose and fix. GPUs won't boost higher if they're close to their thermal limit, so making sure your GPU has ample access to airflow and isn't dusty can go a long way. If you're still seeing high temperatures and lower-than-normal clocks, a repasting job might be in order, especially if your card is a bit older. Replacing the thermal compound can make a huge difference in your cooler's ability to keep the GPU core cool, and if you replace the thermal pads on the power delivery and memory components, that can also reduce the overall load on your cooler.
If your performance is solid, don't worry about clock speed
If you're seeing great performance out of your GPU but lower than advertised clock speeds, you're probably not missing out on very much. Even a modest increase in clock speed like I saw with my Radeon card can only make a few percent difference in performance in some situations. A lot of clock speed is dependent on load, so ensuring you're testing a variety of applications will give you a better picture of if something is actually wrong with your GPU.
