Overclocking your graphics card can enhance its efficiency by 5% to as a lot as 15% (or extra), relying on the actual card mannequin. After all, as with all overclocking, care must be taken to keep away from working your GPU at unsafe settings. However when you have one of many finest graphics playing cards and also you’re trying to eke out a bit extra efficiency, we’ll how we go about overclocking and figuring out “secure” settings.
Earlier than overclocking, it is necessary to get a baseline measurement of how your graphics card performs. You need to have the ability to see how a lot sooner your PC runs after tuning, in any case — if efficiency would not enhance, you will wish to know. Verify our information on find out how to check graphics card efficiency, and you may additionally wish to verify your graphics card temperatures and clock speeds.
After you have your baseline inventory efficiency information, it is time to begin overclocking. There are a number of utilities, however we’ll give attention to MSI Afterburner, which is without doubt one of the hottest and generally used GPU overclocking instruments. The identical primary course of can be utilized with different utilities, together with EVGA Precision X1, Asus GPU Tweak (opens in new tab), and different graphics card vendor utilities. It is also doable to overclock AMD and Nvidia GPUs utilizing the built-in utility in AMD’s drivers or Nvidia’s GeForce Expertise, which we’ll cowl beneath, however we’ll begin with the common method to overclocking your GPU.
Overclocking With MSI Afterburner
Here is the principle interface for MSI Afterburner, utilizing the v3 pores and skin. It reveals sliders for core voltage, energy restrict, core clock, reminiscence clock, and fan velocity. By default, Afterburner locks out voltage changes. If you wish to play with that, go into the settings and verify the field for “Unlock voltage management.” You possibly can strive setting it to reference design, customary MSI, prolonged MSI, or third social gathering — some playing cards will solely enable voltage changes with the right mode, and a few may not enable it in any respect.
One choice for overclocking is to make use of the automated OC scanner device. Press Ctrl+F, then click on the OC Scanner button within the top-right nook and let it do its factor. That is purported to make overclocking simpler, however as with most auto-tuning utilities, your mileage might fluctuate. We have had it crash, and we have had it generate unstable overclocks as nicely. It would not do something for reminiscence clocks both, so you will doubtless find yourself going the handbook route. The OC scanner can take 20 minutes to run, and more often than not, you will get a fast and simple overclock a lot sooner by yourself.
My method is to fireplace up a graphically intense sport or benchmark that can run in a window, then I run the sport at 1920×1080 or 2560×1440 (relying on the GPU I am utilizing) and get to a spot the place nothing goes to kill me. From there, I swap over to Afterburner and begin attempting some changes. Notice that you will need a sport or check that does not cease rendering whenever you go away focus (so if it reveals the menu whenever you Alt+Tab, that is not going to work).
There are 4 major factors of curiosity when overclocking a graphics card: GPU core clock, reminiscence clock, GPU voltage, and fan velocity. (In some circumstances, you may also alter reminiscence voltage.) I begin by discovering the utmost “steady” core clock, then I discover the utmost “steady” reminiscence clock, after which I attempt to discover a mix of the 2 that leads to optimum efficiency.
Notice that “steady” is in citation marks as a result of even when the preliminary testing appears to work nice, there’ll typically be exceptions the place some video games or purposes crash whereas others work. When that occurs, you will have to return to tune the settings and see if you could find some that enable the sport to run correctly. As you’ll be able to most likely guess, the extra demanding the sport (i.e., if it makes use of ray tracing and DLSS on an Nvidia GPU), the extra doubtless it’s to require extra nice tuning and decrease clocks.
For this tutorial, we’ll use Cyberpunk 2077, working in a window at 2560×1440 with Ray Tracing-Extremely settings and DLSS High quality mode, to discover a affordable overclock for a GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Version card. That ticks all of the bins for a demanding sport that can doubtless push the GPU to its limits, and it additionally has a built-in benchmark that can allow us to see what occurs to efficiency after tuning.
We began with a GPU core overclock. After loading the sport and making use of the suitable settings, we maxed out the facility restrict and set the fan velocity to 80% to make sure the GPU and reminiscence stayed cool. Every little thing was nice thus far, and we utilized a 100 MHz offset to the GPU core. That labored okay, which is nearly all the time the case — if you cannot get not less than a 100 MHz core overclock, we most likely would not fear about going any additional along with your specific graphics card.
With that preliminary efficiency enhance in play, we then tried a 150 MHz core overclock… and Cyberpunk 2077 virtually instantly crashed. We tried maxing out the core voltage after restarting the sport, and it nonetheless crashed, which suggests a 150 MHz offset will not work. We break up the distinction and dropped to 125 MHz, which additionally crashed. It appeared fairly steady after maxing out the core voltage at +100, however that additionally crashed after a number of minutes.
Finally, +100 MHz on the GPU cores seems to be so far as we’re prone to get with this card, although do notice that the elevated energy restrict means we’re working fairly a bit sooner than at inventory — GPU clocks hovered round 1755 MHz at inventory, in comparison with 1905 MHz with our overclock. A giant chunk of that comes because of the elevated energy restrict, as even with a 0 MHz GPU overclock, we noticed common clocks of 1875 MHz in our testing.
Subsequent, we labored on a reminiscence overclock. We dropped the GPU core clock again to +0 MHz however left the facility restrict on the most (114% on this card). There’s often a good quantity of headroom, so we began with a +750 MHz offset on the GDDR6X reminiscence. That provides an efficient reminiscence clock of 21Gbps, and after a number of minutes of working round within the sport, we figured it was working nice. +1000 MHz (21.5Gbps) additionally appeared steady, as did +1250 MHz (22Gbps), however +1500MHz instantly crashed our system and compelled a system restart. Did we point out overclocking is usually a trial and error course of?
After extra tinkering and testing, we mixed the GPU and VRAM overclocks to finish up with +100 MHz on the GPU core and +1000 MHz on the GDDR6X reminiscence. Notice that Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs have “error detect and retry” on the reminiscence, which may generally obscure borderline unstable overclocks, and we figured 21.5Gbps was sufficiently quick.
GPU Overclocking Efficiency
What did the above do for efficiency? Here is how the inventory, GPU core solely, VRAM solely, and GPU plus VRAM overclocks fared at 4K RT-Extremely with DLSS High quality within the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark. We additionally examined a second sport, Borderlands 3, at 4K and Badass settings with the identical 4 GPU settings.
We’ll forgive you if that feels underwhelming. Finally, our most GPU overclock improved efficiency on the RTX 3090 by 8.6% in Borderlands 3 and eight.5% in Cyberpunk 2077. Most of these positive factors got here from the GPU core overclock, which improved efficiency by 7.3% in Borderlands 3 and seven.5% in Cyberpunk 2077. In the meantime, simply overclocking the VRAM improved efficiency by 2.1% in BL3 and 6.0% in CP77.
Your precise positive factors can fluctuate a lot, relying in your graphics card. For instance, the RTX 3090 is not identified for being reminiscence bandwidth starved usually, however the reference mannequin positively runs into energy limits at inventory. That is why the core overclock mattered greater than the VRAM overclock. Nonetheless, the outcomes we have proven above aren’t atypical for graphics card overclocking, and we often see a few 5–10% enchancment in efficiency.
AMD and Nvidia “Constructed-In” Overclocking
You should utilize different instruments to overclock your GPU, however in case you do not wish to trouble with MSI Afterburner, you must most likely simply use the built-in instruments supplied by AMD and Nvidia. Nvidia supplies an auto-tuning device and you may specify voltage and energy limits, a temperature goal, and a fan velocity goal. After that, you simply go away it as much as the drivers, which is able to overclock the GPU cores however not the VRAM.
AMD’s overclocking instruments constructed into Radeon Settings are much more helpful. You are able to do all the things you want, specifying voltages, clock speeds, fan speeds, reminiscence speeds, and extra. You too can ask the drivers to overclock the VRAM or the GPU — however not each. Alternatively, it may well auto-undervolt the GPU, which reduces efficiency a bit but in addition tends to decrease temperatures and energy use. Principally, you do not want a separate GPU overclocking utility, although we nonetheless usually discover MSI Afterburner to be extra acquainted and simpler to make use of.
One huge advantage of AMD’s overclocking instruments is you could specify per-game OC profiles. Possibly one sport is not as intense and you may push clocks larger, or perhaps you’ve a sport that simply wants the additional oomph to supply a smoother gameplay expertise. It may be as advanced or so simple as you wish to make it, although finally, it would typically nonetheless come all the way down to trial and error.
Backside Line: GPU Overclocking
Do you have to overclock your graphics card? We might be cheeky and say that if it’s good to ask, you must most likely simply go away nicely sufficient alone. The fact is that AMD and Nvidia — and their graphics card companions — are likely to bin the chips and push efficiency practically to the restrict. Overclocking additionally will increase the facility use and sometimes the temperature of your graphics card, which may trigger it to wear down sooner. However even perhaps worse than that’s the truth that overclocking often solely improves efficiency by 5–10%.
That would possibly be noticeable, to some individuals, with out working a bunch of benchmarks. In follow, there’s often not sufficient headroom that it is well worth the problem. You may give the auto-tuning choices within the AMD and Nvidia drivers a shot, and that can most likely get you not less than half of what you’d get with handbook tuning. Plus, it is a easy flip of a swap moderately than one thing that requires lots of trial and error.
As somebody who has finished lots of overclocking over time, I can say that one of many worst emotions is whenever you’re in the course of a sport and it all of the sudden crashes as a consequence of a previously “steady” overclock. You are then within the unenviable place of questioning if there is a bug within the sport, in case your overclock pushed too far, or if there’s one thing else unsuitable along with your PC. I’ve misplaced numerous hours troubleshooting my PCs, and lately I simply do not discover GPU overclocking to be notably necessary.
You do not have to agree with me, nevertheless; maybe your specific {hardware} will ship an even bigger enhance in efficiency after tuning. Simply keep watch over your GPU and VRAM temperatures, and remember to offer your PC a daily cleansing to maintain it working easily. Additionally, do not go into GPU overclocking anticipating a 20% enchancment or extra in efficiency, as a result of these days are far up to now — until you utilize liquid nitrogen.