CLOCKING OFF
Does overclocking your GPU actually do anything anymore?
Friends, the worst fate has befallen me: my GPU’s getting a bit old. Not so much that certain new releases are off limits, you understand. That used to be the case in a bygone era of PC gaming when advancements moved quicker. Minimum requirements were to be agonized over, parents pleaded with, witnessing the cool new game on even the lowest settings a triumph. No, what I mean is there are now some games I have to use the ‘performance’ DLSS mode with. I know. I’m really sad about it.
Because it only feels like five minutes ago that my RTX 2080 TI—Founders Edition, mind you—stood atop the GPU pile, metaphorical legs splayed wide in a power pose favored by Beyoncé or, less convincingly, right-wing politicians. For a moment back then it was the best card you could chuck in a PC. And now it’s subjecting me to very marginally blurrier DLSS. And sometimes, I notice the frame rate slip below 50 in Alan Wake II. The worst part: Nvidia doesn’t even give me DLSS 3’s cool frame generation tech, which would alleviate the issue of running an older card. Wonder why they did that, eh?
You know this pain too. And pain is the word, not mere hyperbole, given that Nvidia’s top consumer GPU costs the best part of two thousand pounds sterling, also known as
‘five entire PS5s’. The sensation of nearing GPU upgrade time is now akin to taking your car in for an MOT with a deep suspicion that it needs an entirely new engine, or hearing worryingly terminal noises coming from your boiler.
But what if there was a solution that didn’t involve shelling out close to the UK average monthly take-home salary to get slightly better frame rates? Time was, you could turn to clock settings to squeeze a bit more out of your components and win a few extra frames that way. Overclocking has fallen out of favor in recent years, though.
Ironically in an era in which many of us have liquid-cooled PCs and cases with incredible airflow, we tend not to bother messing with stock values in our BIOS.
A few factors contributed to that, including power-efficient designs on chips that in effect ‘overclocked’ themselves under high load, and most significantly an industry clampdown on getting free performance. You didn’t need to buy the ‘K’ variant of a CPU to unlock the overclocking features, once upon a time.
But while CPU and RAM overclocking’s always been a bit of a dark art involving unfriendly BIOS menus and over-volting, graphics cards have traditionally been easier to tweak. And that’s still true today —third-party GPU manufacturers EVGA, Asus and MSI all offer overclocking tools for Windows and change values in real time.
The best of the bunch is still old reliable MSI Afterburner. It’s got a small install footprint, a simple UI and easy profile saving. But crucially, does it actually let me get more performance out of my veteran card? I reinstalled Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and intended to find out.
NIGHT CITY
THE BEST OF THE BUNCH IS STILL OLD RELIABLE MSI AFTERBURNER
First stop, of course, was Reddit. Why bother to ramp up your base clock and memory clock frequencies in nice, safe increments and test each setting in a benchmark when you can just paste in someone else’s values and hope for the best? Consensus online was that most users were able to hit was 100-200Mhz to the core and up to 500MHz to the memory. I started with a ‘conservative’ 100Mhz and 400Mhz respectively, took a trip to Night City and observed the results.
Incidentally, is anyone selling a 4090? As suspected, my GPU could hold those values and remain stable, and as a nice bonus it didn’t even sound like a Boeing 787 was idling in my office. But the benefit to performance? Negligible.
Based on Cyberpunk’s benchmark, even when I dared to overclock to 130MHz core and 500MHz memory, the FPS kickback was only 3-4 extra frames at 1600p, max graphics settings and DLSS on quality mode.
And that makes sense. Where once GPU manufacturers set their clock speeds extremely cautiously, thinking of the card’s entire lifespan, modern designers push the silicon about as hard as it can go in boost mode, and let the card’s load dictate when that boost mode kicks in. Cards have been auto-overclocking ever-more intelligently for a decade now, and unless you’re willing to run your system submerged in liquid nitrogen you’re not going to get substantial gains by tweaking the numbers. It’s a lot more user-friendly, and paired with AI-assisted performance enhancement it makes for easier gaming. Just as long as you’re not ringfenced out of the new software features games depend on to hit playable frame rates, like DLSS 3’s frame generation. Now, back to setting up those eBay alerts…
Phil Iwaniuk