Titan V GPU Core vs. Memory Overclocking Benchmarks
Titan V GPU Core vs. Memory Overclocking Benchmarks
2017-12-14
as we work towards our hybrid content
for the Titan V Volta card we're now
looking at clock scaling so how does the
game and synthetic performance change as
we scale the HBM versus the core clock
basically answering the question of
which one matters more for these couple
of applications we're testing today and
although the Titan V which runs on Volta
may not have the next-gen gaming
architecture in its final form because
it is ultimately a compute card for
scientific workloads and things like
that it can still teach us about
Nvidia's direction which thus far with
this card we've learned appears to be
targeting async compute and lower level
API optimization before we get into that
this content is brought to you by the
Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid
cooler which is a 360 millimetre
radiator plus 3 120 fans that are RGB
illuminated the if then we'll take it
ring fans at that this is a 4.5 done a
stack pump which is one of the faster
pumps you can learn more at the link in
the description below so this test is
pretty straightforward all we're doing
is testing multiple different core and
hpm clock combinations we're doing that
with EVGA precision which works actually
really well at this card even though
they didn't even release a build for it
and we're running with the fan at 100%
for all tests just to eliminate that
overheating variable from the equation
this is also done it with 120% power
offset so these tests we have the most
data for with synthetics that's
precisely what synthetics are built for
3d mark and superposition primarily and
then we also have sniper elite ashes of
the singularity and destiny to as real
gaming benchmarks the reasons we chose
these are because for destiny 2 we saw
very little scaling compared to the
Titan XP in some instances and we think
that's because we're becoming Rob's
bound as the Rob's on this card are the
same count as on the previous 10 series
cards at the high end for ashes of the
singularity we saw a middle step of
performance it was 10% over the Titan XP
and for sniper we saw massive gains over
the previous architecture because it's
asynchronous compute enabled and it's a
lower level DirectX 12 API which Ashes
is as well but it behaves differently so
that gives us a full suite of what we
can expect to see from the card under
various can
and if you want the full details on
testing you can click the links in the
description below to the article but
let's just dive in with sniper and
towards the end we'll have a lot more
data for the synthetic workloads so
we're just starting with the polar
opposites for the games as we know games
will interest most of you more than
synthetics and also games will have the
least change as opposed to more
sensitive synthetics for Sniper Elite 4
we observed a slightly more beneficial
impact from just HBM overclocking
indicated by one twenty nine point six
FPS average and marginally increased
lows versus one twenty five point two
FPS average this shows a three point
five percent increase from doing just
HBM to overclocking versus just the core
overclocked overclocking either one
stand alone is still getting us a
noteworthy jump over the stock Titan V
minimally eight point seven percent but
overclocking both has the most
impressive gains jumping up to 142 FPS
average it's almost as if the core and
HBM overclocks
stack so to speak in this particular
title and that makes sense
remember that Sniper Elite 4 again uses
asynchronous compute low-level API s and
leverages components more heavily
especially extra shaders this we think
is an indicator of where Nvidia is going
with its future gaming architecture
whatever that may be it will likely be a
voltage derivative but won't be volta in
its current form in ashes of the
singularity with DirectX 12 we're
observing clock scallion at HB m scaling
almost equally the increased core clock
helps a bit more in frame time
consistency but doesn't move the average
in a meaningful way versus just the
increased HBM clock these are
functionally the same again overclocking
both provides a noteworthy gain about 5%
over the individual component over
clocks but doing one or the other shows
what we're seeing here destiny 2 showed
some of the least scaling in our
original test which is a mix of its
DirectX 11 API and more importantly a
potential ROPS limitation with destiny 2
we observed marginally higher
performance with just an HBM overclock
at two point six percent boosted over
the core only overclocked overclocking
both the core and HBM gave us another 8%
over the core only OC and here's what we
observed in firestrike ultra for this
one we saw just the core over clocks
generally provide
Greater uplift with a change of 86 86
points for the core only to 84 34 points
for the memory only the difference is a
boost of about 3% for core over memory
only over clogging and fire strike ultra
overclocking both to 200 megahertz
offset gets us to 90 26 points where
we're observing diminishing returns
versus the one seventy-five megahertz
hpm to offset and even one 50 megahertz
HBM to offset it would appear that the
final 25 megahertz of HBM clock isn't
really doing a lot for us or that we're
becoming bound to somewhere else in the
architecture that may be core clock but
this is behavior we also saw with Vega
where at some point you start becoming
bound elsewhere and the memory clocks
don't do as much as they did at the
lower end finally superposition shows
more gains from the core then the memory
only over clocks but not by much the
difference is about 1.5 percent we don't
run into diminishing returns as hard
with this one as we did with fire strike
as the one seventy-five megahertz offset
the one fifty megahertz offset and even
the one hundred megahertz
HBM to offset all show somewhat
comparable scaling and performance our
100 megahertz core and 200 Hertz HBM to
offsets also show a slight gain over
core only or hpm only overclocking and
further illustrates that there's a bit
more Headroom to boost performance in
this particular application generally
speaking it looks like a core overclock
minimally helps a bit more than hpm
overclocking and some of these tests and
it kind of worst case they do about the
same as each other doing both does get
us sort of stacks performance in Sniper
Elite 4 where we gain almost equal
amounts from each aspect of the
overclock which really speaks to how the
game works as opposed to a lot of the
other games on the market for destiny 2
it's not quite as exciting and
superposition we have a bit more
Headroom and less of the diminishing
returns than we saw with fire strike so
they all have slightly different
behaviors but not that different and
fortunately with this card you're not
too often in a position where you're
wondering should I overclock a versus B
because you run to other stability or
thermal limitations before you run into
those types of limitations so again this
is all sort of academic exercises it's a
look at this
new architecture Volta and how it
performs under different conditions with
clocks thermals annoys all that stuff so
we can start to form a picture of where
nvidia is going for the future
now it's our present understanding that
what we're seeing here not even just the
tensor core is wise but what we're
seeing here as a whole in Volta is
probably going to be at least somewhat
changed a name for the future
architectures for gaming now how much it
changes architectural II how much it
changes underneath whether these are two
different architectures developed in
tandem or whether they're taking Volta
stripping out the tensor cores and then
providing a gaming architecture with
greater efficiency we're not sure the
sort of expectation would be that Volta
where it appears inefficient which would
be in terms of power to performance and
gaming should improve when it becomes
whatever it becomes for the gaming cards
because there's all these items in this
card floating point sixty four vectors
there's tensorflow processors that do
nothing for games except sit there and
take up space on the die and that's not
great for efficiency so we would expect
that that particular aspect would
improve for the gaming generation cards
as far as the rest of the behavior
though this gives us some idea as to
what's going on it is an async future it
looks like from what we're seeing from
the data thus far and that'll be the
first time anybody is making a big push
there so we'll see what happens but the
next thing to do is probably the hybrid
mod see how much more we can get out of
the clocks because right now we're the
thermal limit and power limit colliding
at this point so hopefully we can fix
some of that maybe a shunt mod we'll see
thank you for watching as always keep an
eye out for builds woods content coming
up soon on this channel which will be a
PCB and vrm analysis you can go to store
gamers nexus dotnet slash mod matte if
you want to pick up a mod matte like
this one so that we just spent a lot of
time working on this it has a plug that
connects to a common ground point which
connects to your wrist and then to a
ground pin in the wall so everything is
anti-static free pretty high quality
materials and it has a quick reference
cheat sheets printed on it or you can
just subscribe for more thank you for
watching
I'll see you all next time
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.