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The AMD Driver Thread

Kei said:
Yep it's annoying as I'm actually getting poor frame rates in games that are over 15 years old due to low clock speeds. I think my old X850 would be smoother.

An option in the profiles to allow forcing a certain P state clock regardless of actual GPU usage while that 3d application is running would be ideal. Rather similar to nvidia's power management option where you can switch between adaptive and full power.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if it's possible in the profiles, but it does work in global wattman settings: on custom settings you can click on the header where it says e.g. STATE 6 and set that to be the minimum state (and same for the memory clocks). Don't be surprised if it doesn't improve performance though, as from what I've seen it just means GPU utilisation will be lower while performance stays the same.
 
Shiari said:
I'm not sure if it's possible in the profiles, but it does work in global wattman settings: on custom settings you can click on the header where it says e.g. STATE 6 and set that to be the minimum state (and same for the memory clocks). Don't be surprised if it doesn't improve performance though, as from what I've seen it just means GPU utilisation will be lower while performance stays the same.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that, I'd never have found that one out. You were indeed correct that it doesn't solve the issue as the utilisation is simply awful.
 
Yeah, I suspect there might be some driver issues taking part, the driver might be trying too hard to keep power down or something ... hard to prove anything though. Maybe @AMDMatt can ask around about this or something?
 
The method of setting the minimum state in wattman seems to do what it's supposed to and the clocks don't fall like they did with low utilisation. Problem is the utilisation. I'm seeing the framerate drop from over 400 down to mid 40's for no obvious reason. I'm beginning to wonder if it's the CPU.

The games in question are nolf, nolf 2 and call of duty 1 & 2 so far. I do see utilisation issues in crysis 3, GTA V and fallout 4 but I think they really are CPU related.
 
What I'm seeing is that it would seem the driver is "clever" enough to know it can achieve roughly the same workload at lower clocks, and thus doesn't kick the clocks into maximum. However, whatever the driver is doing behind the scenes also keeps performance from reaching full potential in these less demanding workloads. (The common denominator here from what I've seen would be anything that doesn't manage to achieve high GPU utilisation).

I've spotted a particular downside to this "keeping the clocks low": frame rate and frame time is also affected. This GPU load in this graph generated by X-Plane 11, an application that currently has difficulty getting these clocks to go full out (though there are some upcoming optimisations for AMD GPU's in the next release). What you're seeing in the graph is just a plane idling on a runway with fairly taxing settings, repeatedly without ClockBlocker running (~750MHz clocks) and with ClockBlocker (1616MHz clocks). With the higher clocks the framerate jumps from 25 to 28 fps, and frametime is thus approximately 3-4ms lower (~40-41ms vs ~37ms). It also costs about 60-70W extra (according to Afterburner, anyway - not currently hooked up to the Watt meter) to get me these 8.3% extra frames.

7oGbyUB.png

This "keeping the clocks low" does have one advantage though, something I hadn't really heard before: coil whine ... first time I've heard it from my Vega 64, and it was in the X-Plane 11 menu ... that coil whine is probably usually drowned out by any fan noise.
 
Why can't there just be an option in drivers to run at the max clocks I set in Wattman when I 3d app is launched. Why don't the cards reach the settings you set for the core? Eg. Core is set at 1630mhz but tends to hover around 1590-1620Mhz. Fair enough temps and power are a factor but even when there is no restraint the clocks are always a little shy of what's set
 
My monitor is 144hz and some games (Crysis, Crysis 2, Mafia 3...) ignoring Windows settings & forcing 60 Hz while in fullscreen and those games can't play in borderless mode.
(Alt + Enter can let Crysis work in 144hz but Crysis 2, Mafia 3 can't)

I survey many posts, it seems Nvidia users can use this setting to forcing 144Hz.
Nvidia settings > Manage 3d settings > Preferred refresh rate > Highest available

I want to know if AMD has the same or similar function or maybe some tools can solve my problem?

Many thanks!
 
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So I presume AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition is out today? No sign of it so far. Really want Wattman profiles, taken AMD way to long to code this.
 
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