is overclocking gpu pointless for gaming

I just ran metro at 715/900(6990m) and was getting 19fps
I reran metro 2033 at 825/1015 and was getting 20fps

I think that a fact would be if a game is unplayable (24fps and less) overclocking will make 0 differance.

share your experiences of overclocking and making a game playable here.

imho overclocking is only good if the game is already playable or just barely playable, like going from 30fps to 35fps which i do reg.

 

i dont think thats completely true, when i play bf3 on my 675m, without over clock i get average of 33fps, after overclock i can go up 5 frames. even on my old ATI HD 3650 overclocking makes BF3 playable at lowest possible setting

 

didnt I already mention that in my OP????

 

also forgot to mention metro is probably a very badly optimized game

 

if I turn of dof and turn down aa I average 50 fps at 720p...its not too bad

 

DOF is horribly taxing on GPU's. Turn that off, lower the AA and you should be able to run medium-high DX 11 on 1080p.

 

It completely depends on the game. You can go from 20 to 30 fps depending on the game or, like in your case, barely see any increase. Also, there are a good number of games where you are at the 30fps mark and sudden movements or a lot of on screen action gives you those annoyingly noticeable lags. OC'ing can help you there and improve your gaming experience. Sure if you are stuck at 10fps then there's very little OC'ing can do for you but then you cannot call it pointless because OC'ing is not a solution there - reducing graphics or purchasing a new GPU is.

 

What Mav and Meaker said

 

I overclock my 660m not for the max fps... but the min fps... it does help a lot in certain game... not all of them...

Im one of those guy that barely see the difference between 45 and 60 fps... but i do see it if it gets under 30...

In Guildwars 2 or starcraft 2... most of the time its fine... 45+fps... but than a big battle or too many special effect will drop the fps under 30... but with the small overclock (+135) it stay over my limit...

As long as the system is stable... and the temperature under the factory limit... and also no voltage mod... than the overclock is fine and shouldnt create any problem...

Anyway with those new technology optimus and the amd one... the gpu isnt used that much outside gaming...

 

I OC for fun and to see potential, but for daily use I typically don't overclock until I get to a point where a new game comes out that I need/want better FPS. Although I typically will overclock a decent amount with stock voltage as long as temps aren't crazy. Actually in the case of my NP6110, I run at an overclock while undervolted, so power consumption and heat is still same or less than at stock speed and voltage. If it's possible to tune like that, that's my preference.

 

I am on a similar boat like HTWingNut. I'd rather have OC with undervolt, but if not possible, I try to keep stock volt and a decent OC with controlled temps.

As for benefit from OC, it depends on the game, and on the % of overclock. Each game taxes the hardware in a different way, so you can't say exactly how an overclock will help, if the bottleneck of said game is somewhere else. Keep in mind that even in a perfect scenario where a 10% overclock yielded a 10% performance increase, that would translate going from 20fps to 22, or from 50 to 55. The point is, the higher your stock performance, small % gains will be more pronounced.

OC helps a lot with minimum framerate too. Sometimes you might play in a range between 24-40fps depening what's on screen. If an OC can help you raise the minimum fps near 30, it will help your overall experience in the end.

In my experience overclocking since phew... many years and machines ago, it helps bring the performance out of many cards. It's the difference, sometimes, between sacrificing a setting to keep performance up or not.

 

so some agree..not like your going to go from 20fps to 30fps but you will edge out that 28fps

any games I can test overclocks with?

edit I ran heaven benchmark to see if you guys are correct.

no overclock i had 23.6 average lows of 8 highs of 70
overclocked i got 26.8 lowsof 6.3 highs of 76

so basically it has to be a special type of game? yes thats a quesion

 

I think you picked one of the worst games to make this comparison. Metro 2033 utilizes hardware horribly in the first place.

That being said, OCing has took a slide show to a playable game a few times for me. Especially on my geforce 9000 series.

Sent from my SGH-T999

 

From what I've heard, Metro 2033 is terribly optimized but that sounds like a CPU bottleneck, what CPU do you have?

 

I have a 2630qm...and when I lower resolution framerates double so its not a cpu bottleneck

 

Idk what to tell you then... Try turning off DoF, I've heard that helps a lot

 

I tried that...works like a charm ty

 

My pleasure man, anything to help

 

I cant tell the differance between dx9 and dx11 with metro 2033... am I alone on this one

 

I'm sure you're not, I can't tell the difference between them on BFBC2

 

If in game you ever find a body of water and can look at it from close, like a beach or something, use D3D9 and D3D11. You will notice a difference there. Probably not so much in darker areas. 11 introduced tessellation. On the other hand, 10 mostly introduced optimizations.

 

I'd hardly call a 50% increase in FPS pointless.... which is why I posted that graph.

 

in the real world it is sorta pointless....

show a game thats unplayble becoming playable with overclocking

 

Highest detail settings in crysis 2, Mechwarrior online, pretty much any taxing modern game at highest settings with AA/AF.

It's not just about playable or not, it's about having the best experience possible, the fewest frame rate drops and most fluid experience.

 

Mafia 2 on my old M11X R1, went from 19 FPS average to around 30, it was unplayable without overclocking for me

 

oh wow...thats pretty cool

I guess I just need to find the right games

did you overclock it 63 percent or something

 

Nope, something like 100 Mhz core overclock

 

You don't NEED to find the right games. Like I have said earlier, some games will be in the higher 20s. Those will benefit greatly from overlcocking. You ran some benchmark and arrived at your conclusion. Benchmarks in this case are completely useless. You cannot model all games with a single benchmark. Every game is different. Heck, every game is different for every GPU. You might get a HUGE increase in a particular game on a nv GPU but it might barely change in an AMD GPU. If you see 15 fps then you don't need overclocking. You need a better GPU or you need to reduce settings. And yes, as has been said before, Metro 2033 is not a good candidate for arriving at this conclusion. Plenty of people overclock, especially a year or two after purchase of their GPU to sustain the same settings. So it is anything but pointless.

Every slider to the right and every setting on ultra in Skyrim gave me like 20 something fps. I then reduced AA to 4x and it averaged around 30. So I could see those annoying lags. I did not want to turn AA off so I just upped my clocks a bit and I was stable aat over 40fps. That is how I run all games. Go all the way, then reduce the so called "unimportant" settings bit by bit and see where you reach about 30. Then OC if going any further on the settings is going to give unsatisfactory results.

 

interesting.

I ran heaven at 838/1080 and got 31 fps, I then ran it at 715/900 and got 28fps.

dont you think thats the perfect example of what overclocking can do when your below 30fps bumps it up 2-3 fps depending on how high you overclock.

 

Heres another example
My GT 420m 1gb (stock 500 mhz core / 800 mhz memory) (yeah its a cheap card). OCing it to 670mhz core / 900 mhz memory gave me great boosts. BF3 had about 20-25 fps on stock, then OCing bumped it up to about 35fps. This actually makes the game smoother and more playable. For me there's a FPS point between unplayable and playable and that would be around 30 fps. So I keep a shortcut on my desktop that OCs my GPU and I click on that before gaming.

I have OCed in other games where performance didnt differ. This is when CPU is the bottleneck. I say if you want OC to help, check your GPU usage. If it is below 95% then it probably won't help you that much.