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Overclocking & Tweaking
As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.
What do we need?
One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.
Where should we go ?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 500 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz.
More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that.
Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today tested cards anyway but we'll show it still ;)All in all... do it at your own risk.
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So what we'll to today is look at three scores in our benchmark session. First off default performance with the clocks as set by BioStar. Then we seek the maximum overclock without voltage selection. And lastly we boost voltage up and overclock to the absolute maximum.
I have to tell you here that since I did not like the V-Ranger software, I boosted voltages on core and memory with V-Ranger and simply overclocked with NVIDIA's control panel.
The results do not lie though, this is the highest overclock ever achieved on a GS card with this kind of cooling. We took the Core up a good 274 MHZ towards 674 Mhz !
Sidenote: Our overclocking results are never a guarantee for your home grown results. Manufacturers' choices in components differ often per batch and so will the end-result. This however is a good indication of what is (or isn't) possible.
Let's have a look what this means for the graphic card overall performance.
Buckle up...
What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.
A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and it's gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.
Frames per second Gameplay <30 FPS very limited gameplay 30-40 FPS average yet very playable 40-60 FPS good gameplay >60 FPS best possible gameplay- So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
- With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
- When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
- Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER of graphics card or a very old game.
So remember this: You are always aiming for the highest possible FPS, versus the highest resolution, versus the highest image quality.
The results is always a combination of these three factors.