GPU running under top clock speed

[0xDECAFBAD]

I have a GeForce 1080 Ti and it's running around 1700mhz instead of 2000. Any idea why this would be? Getting 78fps so it's not like it's not working hard. And before you say thermal throttling I have a custom liquid cooling setup and GPU temp is 30C.

[Ancient]

It's likely, in SN anyway, that the game's 4 main threads are maxed out.

Check CPU/GPU usages. The GPU is probably not running at 100% usage.

My GTX 1080 does this too. I'm running it with an i7-6800K@4.2GHz. Most games aren't as CPU-bound as SN, or rather the Unity 5 engine, is. Once it's couple threads are maxed out on the CPU, specifically the pre-rendering thread, some portion of the GPU's potential is overkill and doesn't get used because the pre-rendering thread is itself a bottleneck.

Nvidia Boost 3.0 is a lot more complex than the previous Boost algorithm and one of it's features is the ability to balance core clock against usage and thermal headroom on the fly. There is no longer only two clocks: standard and boost clock, as there used to be. The drivers can set the clock to anywhere within that range in multiples of 12MHz and can even exceed it if the usage demand is there and the voltage and thermal headroom are low enough to allow for 2100Mhz+. If you adjust the power target up to 120% using PrecisionX OC / Afterburner and put it under a heavy load like Superposition benchmark, you'll see that the card will overclock itself well above whatever the factory OC is advertised as and it will do so without you having to add an explicit offset to the core clock so long as it has voltage and thermal headroom to spare.

If the GPU isn't hitting full 99%-100% usage though, which depends on both the CPU and the game's ability to multithread the pre-rendering pipe, it will downclock from it's max boost clock a bit to save on waste heat/electricity when those higher clocks aren't needed.

[Obraxis]

Unless you're pushing 4K, it's unlikely your GPU is working very hard. Subnautica is not normally GPU-limited, but CPU and especially, I/O limited.

[0xDECAFBAD]

I'll have to check my CPU cores. I recently built a new PC and it's running an i7-7820x @ 5ghz and a Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD so I was hoping for slightly better performance. I'm sure there will be performance optimization before the release so I'm not worried. It generally runs well for me as-is.

[Kanaro Min]

Originally posted by 0xDECAFBAD:

I'll have to check my CPU cores. I recently built a new PC and it's running an i7-7820x @ 5ghz and a Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD so I was hoping for slightly better performance. I'm sure there will be performance optimization before the release so I'm not worried. It generally runs well for me as-is.

Drive speed has little effect on loading stutter right now. Though the SSD is nice to have, even a RAMdrive won't clear up the I/O bottleneck. It's nice to have Obraxis verify either way.