To put Nvidia’s “automatic” overclocking to the test, we picked up our test copy of the Geforce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and installed the latest beta of Geforce Experience. The question we asked ourselves is simply whether Geforce Experience can match our manual efforts and whether the function is worth using.
The new tool is compatible with all cards in the Turing and Ampere series, ie Geforce RTX 2000 and RTX 3000. When this article is published, it is possible that the feature has come out of beta and is a regular part of the Geforce Experience.
So let’s jump to how it actually performed in practice, where we compare the results with the card’s base frequencies and our manual overclocking.
Standard | Manual OC | Geforce Experience OC | |
---|---|---|---|
Geforce RTX 3080 FE (GPU / RAM) | 1 710/19 008 | 1 790/20 000 | 1 749/19 408 |
Geforce Experience “Performance Tuning“turns out to be restrictive in how much it dares to take in and the result is a clock frequency and memory speed that ends up in the middle between the card’s standard frequencies and our manual overclocking. 2.1 percent.
3DMark Time Spy (Extreme) | Battlefield V (4K, Ultra) | |
---|---|---|
Geforce RTX 3080 FE | 8 697/9 113 | 109/91 |
Geforce RTX 3080 FE (Manual OC) | 9 069/9 600 | 116/98 |
Geforce RTX 3080 FE (Geforce Experience OC) | 8 807/9 266 | 111/94 |
In actual performance, it does not look significantly better. In 3Dmark Time Spy, the graphics score increases from 9,113 to 9,266 or about 1.7 percent, and in Battlefield V, the average frame rate increases 1.8 percent. Our manual overclocking in turn increased the results by 5.3 and 6.4 percent, respectively.
Of course, the experience will be slightly different depending on which card you have, what power budget it has as standard and whether it is factory overclocked to begin with or not. But as it looks in our tests, we can state that overclocking with Geforce Experience is hardly worth it.
That the process takes very long time and the fact that the results vary between each run also means that we currently recommend manual overclocking to those who actually want to try to get more performance out of their cards. If you think it’s scary to go for manual overclocking, it’s nice with an alternative, of course, but the problem is then rather that the alternative does not contribute with any significant improvement.
Do you usually overclock your graphics cards or do you run them in standard version? Does Nvidia’s automatic overclocking sound like something you would consider using?