Download more performance for certain AMD GPUs!!! (7900 GRE memory OC limits boosted in new driver)

the RX 7900 GRE from AMD is kind of a weird graphics card when it comes to testing its performance uh because in some games it gives you this huge boost in other games not much compared to the 7800 XT that we had at a very similar price point in addition to all the weirdness of the Chinese only launch at first and then opening up recently in February to uh everybody else I'm uh using the powercolor hellhound model that I got sent for a review sample in this video and uh so like to give you an idea of what I'm talking about for example in cyberpunk with 1440p rt overdrive mode versus 7800 XT I found the 7900 gr was 21% faster whereas if I just went down to just 1440p Ultra without any Ray tracing it was only 7% faster than the 7800 XT uh and if we jump into some other games you can see uh differences all over the place if I jump into RoboCop Rogue City and Unreal Engine 5 game epic settings we're seeing like 9% difference uh if we jump into you know maybe uh Avatar FR uh frontiers of Pandora which is a ray tracing title uh 12% gain here at 1440p Ultra so uh again the differences are usually more consistent than that between gpus from the same brand like AMD versus AMD within the same architecture Generation all of that so what was going on here uh was the fact that the 7900 gr when compared against the 7900 XD and the 7800 XD which price-wise it's kind of slotting into we saw some kind of strange stuff ah I'm going to shrink down and become a mouse pointer uh we saw that if you look at its stream processors or in general just its compute units uh the 7900 XT only has 5% more compute units than the 7900 Gres but it has uh if you look at the 7800 XT going to the 7900 GRE you're getting a 33% compute unit increase um which is quite a bit but if you look at the memory bandwidth uh the 7900 GRE going to the 7900 XT the 7900 XT is an increase of about 39% memory bandwidth from 576 GB per second to 800 GB per second and if you look at it from the 7800 XT as an going to the 7900 GRE you actually lose 8% memory bandwidth uh going to the 7900 GRE now why is that happening it's uh largely the memory speeds and the memory bus so the 7900 gr has the same memory bus as the 7800 XT which is cut uh which is 256 bit versus the 320 bit bus on the 7900 XT and the memory speeds for the 7900 gr are at 18 gbit per second uh which is not only slower than the 20 gbits per second on the 7900 XT but it's even slower than the cheaper 7800 XT which is what's leading to these weird performance differences where if the GPU is primarily uh uh limited by just it could use more cores then we're seeing the larger performance jumps but if it's more limited by memory bandwidth we're not seeing much performance gain compared to the 7800 XT which leads those kind of weird experiences that we're seeing there but a lot of people pointed out at launch man we could probably just overclock that and gain a bunch of performance but the problem was on the launch drivers for the GPU you really had extremely limited memory overclocking potential which is why it's very interesting to now see articles like this uh this one's from uh Tech PowerUp but there's other places reporting on this that uh amd's newest GPU drivers have unlocked the 7900 gr memory OC limits uh for additional performance and tech power up is showing uh that they were able to get their um powercolor hellhound which is the same model I have to a total of a 15% overclock uh performance Improvement uh compared to at Bas and I believe that they um and just using the uh memory performance it looks like they were able uh well sorry I think this is what they were able to do at launch and then this is now on the the newer drivers I think I think is how we read that yeah because we're on the the newer driver listed right there so they were able to unlock a lot more performance from the card now the weird thing is with uh uh with overclocking though is that you know I I hate people like a lot of people say I should do more overclocking in my Benchmark I see that comment a lot my problem is that you're only ever guaranteed when you buy a graphics card to get its out of the box performance you aren't guaranteed to be able to overclock your GPU the same amount that you know a YouTuber or a review Outlet of some kind is able to do because it can depend on the specific silicon quality so I do want to mention that before I go ahead and do what I'm going to do next which is I'm going to toss in my 7900 GRE and we are going to try this out and see if we're able to get a bunch of U boosted performance on mine but again keeping in mind that your results May Vary because of limits to Silicon quality which is why I would have preferred if we maybe just had a better better memory speed out of the box it's unclear why they did this in the first place maybe it's to keep the same power targets as the 7800 XT so that maybe they could just use the same cooler models or something like that for aib partners I don't know anyway I'm going to go ahead po pop in my 7900 gr and we're going to go ahead and do a little overclocking video uh test it out and see what kind of performance gains we can get all right so I have the 7900 gr kicked in and what we're doing right now is running a baseline test on the old driver uh using cyberpunk as kind of a game you know to actually measure measure in-game performance but using the built-in Benchmark run so we can get uh you know extremely limited run to- run variance messing with our results and so this is 1440p ultra settings uh in like I said cyberpunk built-in Benchmark there is no overclocking and we are on the old driver so this is our absolute Baseline and you can see the uh the stats overlay I'm using here is just the one built in from amd's driver software and also capture wise the capture right now is being done on a second PC using a capture card so there's no capture happening on the PC running the game so that is not impacting performance it also means that sometimes you'll get some screen tearing and things like that because um I don't have uh vsync enabled and it's it's a capture card so limited you know variable refresh rate kind of doesn't really kick in anyway the point is uh that's the capture method we're using for all of this and we'll go ahead and use cyberp Punk's built-in Benchmark results and you can again see the memory speeds and whatnot and all that but we're getting 95 again this is 1440p no upscaling it says preset is custom because if you kick on to ultra that would include amd's FSR enabled by default so I've have disabled that and that's why it's reading as custom so uh we can see that that's the Baseline results is 95 FPS and uh if we go to the tuning section you can see that uh we have let me get this overlay out out of the screen so it's not bothering us so we can see that right now everything is just just on default I do have Smart Access Memory enabled and uh you can see my system specs in the video description it's a 7800x 3D based system so we're not getting CPU limited and all of that so now what we're going to do is look at a quick overclock so we are going to go to the GPU tuning and we are going to uh enable some custom tuning and we have to accept that you know uh we we accept the consequences anyway this isn't really a overclocking guide nor am I exactly an overclocking expert although I do play around with it from time to time we're going to kick on vram tuning and we're going to look at on the uh again what driver version we're on right now is the 24.11 I have not downloaded the new one yet so we're looking at the limited overclocking ability uh on the original uh driver so that's what we're looking at here so vram tuning and let's see we could try going to fast timings and we could go to Advanced controls and we can basically look at how fast it would let us go so you can see it's extremely limited if you turn that off of advanced you can see it as a percentage it was only allowing a 2% Max frequency boost on the memory uh on the memory frequency which is extremely low we're going to go ahead and apply changes although we did at least go to fast timings and this now there's no guarantee even this is going to be stable I actually have not tried overclocking this card yet so let's go ahead ahead and uh Run The Benchmark again uh with that being the only changes and we're going to go ahead and see if we get any noticeably different results let me kick the overlay back on uh and again on the left hand side of the screen I am showing things like the uh memory utilization memory clock speeds um uh things like that so we can go ahead and see if we get any kind of meaningful difference but again this is on the original drivers so that only 2% boost to the memory clock you can see it is showing uh a little over 2300 mahz here and um yeah we'll go ahead and see if we get anything better than about 95 FPS we're running to the end of The Benchmark run everything seemed perfectly stable and we got up to 97.8 five so we can see that there was a small performance increase but extremely modest by maxing out the memory overclock on the original driver so what I'm going to do next and you don't need to sit around and watch is I'm going to download the newest driver and then we're going to see what else we can uh do on that all right I've installed the new driver and what we're running right now is no overclocking on the new driver because often if you compare game performance on different driver versions you can actually see a few per change just by changing the driver version so it's important to look at what we got on the last driver uh without overclocking and what we're getting on the new driver without overclocking so we can see if our performance is better now is it because of the Improvement to overclocking or is it because of the new driver or some combination of the two so that's what we're looking at here so if you look at the memory clock speeds and all of that you see we're around 2238 so this is no memory over clocking enabled at this time but once again we are on the new driver uh and we are in the same cyberpunk settings 1440p Ultra but with upscale upscaling disabled uh so it is running at the native 1440p resolution we're using the built-in Benchmark again so it should keep uh run to- run variance to a minimum and here we go with the results looks like we've got 10097 so actually does look like the new driver is performing better than the old driver even without overclocking so now what we're going to do let me get that overlay out of our way is we are going to now kick on the custom tuning we're going to go to vram and you can see now that the slider goes all the way to 33% boost now that doesn't mean we're going to be stable at a 33% boost but remember last time we had a 2% boost as our maximum if we go to Advanced controls that means before we were a we were able to go to you know about 23 uh 20 300 was the farthest it would let us go this one will let you go all the way to 3,000 although again don't expect that to necessarily work it's very likely that that would crash uh what I think I'd like to try is a 15% boost uh and because I think that should put us to just under 2600 that's a little bit less than what tech PowerUp said they were able to get and usually when I'm doing an overclock I like to look at what other people were able to achieve on the same uh graphic Hardware see if that's stable on mine if it's not reduce it a bit uh if it is increase it a bit but let's go ahead and start with that we're not going to try any of the timing changes yet or anything let's go ahead and just kick on The Benchmark run and see what happens I'm also going to kick the overlay back on so we can go ahead and see if we're actually getting the memory clock speeds uh that we should be so again we should be a little bit under 2600 megahertz now which is a significant improvement over um you know the stock speeds and yeah it's looking like we are seeing 2575 um for our megahertz the other thing you want to look for when you're doing overclocking I mean you want to look for stability like is it crashing that's the most obvious thing but you also want to look for artifacting I don't think I see anything yet but that's one reason why I'm doing the video footage here sometimes you'll start to see little sparkles and things show up if you're right at the edge of uh basically your overclock isn't actually stable uh but you're not actually crashing but I am not seeing any weird little sparkles or other artifacting issues it is looking like the memory clock is staying at 2575 and I'll mention that I haven't done anything to increase the power limit of the card other than um uh on all of test runs I've been doing the GPU was at its outof thee boox um settings which did include a it has a dual bios as an OC bi iOS and a uh uh silent bios and I it does default to the OC bios which does give it more um board power than the uh like like reference model would but hey it looks like we got 4.62 so it's looking like we got about a 45% performance increase uh by uh doing the the memory overclock now I'm going to try pushing this a little bit further let's see if we can hit uh 2600 let me look over what did tech power up say they were able to get uh cuz we were slightly more conservative uh I think they hit 2604 stable is what they said they were able to do let's see if we can match that okay I don't see any issues at first uh you know what let's go ahead and actually see when will it just start giving me issues so I I'm curious if I go to 2620 cuz sometimes you can actually just see it give you issues before you even do any sort of a stress test 2630 okay you can you can see the artifact there we got it to crash 2648 so it looks like we definitely can't push that high right the the whole thing's crashing um uh I think I'm getting a total system lock up here black screen yeah it's looking like the whole PC is going to reboot so I'm going to go ahead and deal with that and uh uh edit that little time frame out of the video all right I've done a bunch more overclocking off camera to not waste your time and so i' I've played around with a few things first of all I did back off the uh frequencies to 2588 again I did occasionally crash when I was over 2600 I also tried kicking on the fast memory timings but while that's stable at the default frequencies I could barely push the frequencies uh if I kept the fast timings and I also tried increasing the power limit uh which this card will go up by 15% didn't really affect stabilities on any of the memory stuff so uh additionally to that that I decided to then also play around with some um uh with some of the core clock stuff so here I pushed my Max frequency all the way up to the top and kept my minimum frequency uh just just really close to that at 2700 and then I've actually undervolted the card down to 950 uh by doing that is was actually able to better hold these Max frequencies I haven't tried pushing this much lower than this so I'm not going to say that this is the best overclock you could ever achieve on this card but let's go ahead and give a run here so to be clear though what you're seeing is not going to be just a result of the memory tuning this is also a GPU clock uh increase as well I've enabled the GPU clock speeds in the overlay now uh so you can see that they will be between the 2700 and 2800 minmax that I've set you'll also see that the board power is up over 300 Watts now so this is definitely drawing more power in order to do this although because of the undervolt uh this is not drawing as much power as when I didn't try undervolting uh that's one of the things about AMD gpus if you're not uh familiar with overclocking them not that I'm some like super expert on it myself uh but the under volts can do quite a bit actually to help your clock speeds be able to go up uh so uh this again is the result of the highest I could push my memory speed stably which remember that was getting us around 1042 frames per second on this built-in Benchmark run we've now increased the power limit uh uh taken down the undervolt a little bit pushed up the GPU clock speeds and uh the overall result of that has seemed pretty stable in cyberpunk but again I haven't fully stress tested this in a wide variety of games or anything like that but we can go ahead and at least see what we were able to achieve so I'm getting 110.4 uh so overall that's pretty interesting as a bit again of an AMD uh just kind of interesting note if I kick the voltage all the way back up to where it started at at 1050 um I I I think we'll actually get a worse performance out of it so I'll kind of leave you guys uh with that note on AMD overclocking so notice that when we had it undervolted the GPU clock speeds were able to stay between 2700 and 2800 uh mahz but watch you can already see the clock speeds are much lower than that and notice the board power as well so see interestingly now we're actually falling below 2600 mahz on the GPU clock speeds and the board power is going up closer to the 330 wat limit so that is just like I said something to bear in mind when you are uh doing a MD overclocking is sometimes uh pulling back that um the voltage will actually boost your clock speeds and performance while decreasing power which can be interesting uh but again you have to make sure this overclock is actually stable which is um more complicated than just running the cyberpunk built-in Benchmark which is unfortunately all I really have time for in this video it would be interesting uh to try out my full test Suite of games make sure all of them are stable make sure and just measure the performance increase in each game cuz as we've seen some games are going to be more responding to memory boosts than others also some will respond better to clock speed increases notice our clock speeds here are down below 2600 uh and our and our performance boost here was only at 16.8 so uh interesting stuff like I said playing around with that like I said I went down to 950 I didn't even try going lower I probably could but we're already kind of hitting near the Max frequency this was going to Target anyway I did try the built-in stress test that it has but I didn't like I said try a bunch of other games or anything like that but uh that's what we got for you in this video overall I think um it was kind of fun to talk about the uh AMD overclocking and all of that I don't do much overclocking stuff in my videos and just a bit of a side note uh I don't have I don't use overclocking results in my GPU reviews because like I said individual quality of the specific silicon in the specific model uh has a lot of influence on what you're able to achieve from an overclock versus outof the-box performance which is um what you're guaranteed to get so my reviews are still going to be based on outof the-box performance but it is interesting uh to play around with the overclocking that we're able to achieve here and like I like I showed this is repeatable by bringing the uh the voltage down uh notice that the GPU board power is lower we're not sticking to the 330 WS uh although this is still above the the out of the box settings it's lower than when we um hadn't pulled down the the voltage and notice the GPU clock speeds are once again uh nicely between 27 and 2800 so overall uh pretty good overclock out of this thing stable in cyberpunk but uh like I said haven't fully verified it everything but still cool to see the increased overclocking potential now on this new GPU driver plus we just saw some increased performance on the new GPU driver which was nice to see as well at least in cyberpunk that's always going to be a game to game uh variance type of situation and I think that's what I got for you guys today hope you guys enjoyed the video doing a little overclocking which isn't something I do too often and I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 45,972

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Id: Vg64Wllzs-4

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024