GTX 260/280 Clock Throttling While in 3D Apps. An Explanation.

[phaedrusiszen]

Originally Posted by betterdan

I have been having a problem with the 190.38 and 190.40 drivers where they get stuck at max speed and won't go back down to 2d speeds for a long time while in Windows. WHen they do go back down, a few minutes later they jump right back to 3d speeds. I wouldn't even care but it raises the temperatures in the case unnecessarily.

I have the same issue. The card never clocks itself down, GTX 280 even when sitting on the desktop with nothing running. The card, however, doesn't heat up as much as when it's actually being taxed.

[Shaitan]

"i also dont like this "feature"..

totally agree. Does your cpu overheat when it is in idle state ie not doing heavy calcs???? No. So why would a vid card need to be downclocked?

[phaedrusiszen]

Originally Posted by Shaitan

"i also dont like this "feature"..

totally agree. Does your cpu overheat when it is in idle state ie not doing heavy calcs???? No. So why would a vid card need to be downclocked?

Hopefully not. Although, most modern CPUs downclock when they're idle. I'd prefer my video card to do the same thing. There's no sense in having it burn all that energy when it's not needed. If the feature needs work, it needs work. Doesn't mean the concept is flawed.

[CHK]

Apparantly XFX doesn't like this feature as well...
I asked XFX why the 275 GTX cards I got never clock down when idle and I got a reply that they locked the clocks to max and this is why I'm not seeing the option for power management with the 190.38 drivers.

If I remember correctly all my past 3d cards always had lower clocks when idling in Windows. This isn't a new thing.

[ChrisRay]

To those who upgraded their drivers and dont see the driver option. What process are you going through with the uninstallation? I have seen it not correctly enable due to an inproper driver installation.

((IE something I do alot of)) but if you do a full uninstall/reboot into safe mode and install from safe mode. The option will come back. This is usually just the registry getting confused.

[ChrisRay]

Originally Posted by betterdan

If I remember correctly all my past 3d cards always had lower clocks when idling in Windows. This isn't a new thing.

Idling During Windows why not doing something has been a feature since the introduction of the 260/280. However. This feature is different in the fact that it will idle in 3D mode/DirectX apps if the GPU is not under any real load. verses always throttling up.

To those who dont like the feature. The option is there to turn it off. Personally this feature is a godsend to me.

Why is it making my card jump to full speed while sitting in Windows with maybe IE open? The older drivers it would make my card clock way down while in Windows just using IE. That's what I don't like about it.

Like right now while typing this my card is sitting at max speed of 713 core 1260 memory and I'm typing text into IE wtf? It just dropped to 300 core 100 memory now but it keeps this crap up all the time while doing minor stuff.

[gstanford]

Chris maybe you could suggest to nvidia that they need a third option for clock throttling, so you would end up with the following choices:

Automatic clocking
Force maximum (3D) clocks
Force minimum (2D) clocks

That way everyone should be happy and you won't get complaints like the IE one above.

Originally Posted by gstanford

Chris maybe you could suggest to nvidia that they need a third option for clock throttling, so you would end up with the following choices:

Automatic clocking
Force maximum (3D) clocks
Force minimum (2D) clocks

That way everyone should be happy and you won't get complaints like the IE one above.

haha yea that would be good and would be exactly like old drivers where in 2d they were set at a certain speed and in 3d they were set at a certain speed.
Probably a dumb question but with Aero in Win 7 or Vista is the card using 3d features? Maybe that's why the speeds keeps going up and down while in Windows.

[gstanford]

Well, nvidia has a good profiling system built into their drivers. It might as well be put to good use.

If nvidia can be bothered differentiating "high quality", "quality", "performance", "high performance" in their profiles (especially nowadays where hardly anyone would drop past 'quality' on g80 and above), then they can and should put the same sort of effort into clock throttling (and indeed any reasonable feature end users would like control over). No-one forces people to actually use the profiles but the options are (and should be) there when a user decides they need them.

[ChrisRay]

While Force 3D minimum clocks has already been brought up. And its been looked into. Its alot more difficult than it sounds to implement. At least in a stable driver.((nobody likes driver stops responding issues)) The idea isn't out of the question. But its not something in the near future either because it will/would require alot more time to get it to work properly without issue.