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Does GPU clock speed matter for gaming?
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As per title. To be specific, two cards in the same generation.
How much of an effect does, say a ~100-200 MHz discrepancy between two video cards have, practically speaking in gaming?
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Assuming you have enough power, vram, and are not throttling, clockspeed to fps usually shows almost a linear correlation. So if you're at 1GHz getting 50fps, raising the clock speed to 1.1GHz would get you around 55fps (10%).
Now because nothing is perfect and other components such as the cpu and memory have to work slightly harder as well, the increase is going to be slightly lower. It also depends on the gpu architecture, memory, specific game, and other factors, but usually you can expect anywhere from a ~0.6-0.9 increase in fps. A bigger problem is when you hit another limitation such as memory or TDP in the card itself. In these cases, raising the core clock isn't going to do much at all.
So in summary it really depends on a lot of factors. The way I see it is that if you can overclock a card you should go for it. It's never going to hurt in terms of fps. Core and memory overclocks can make a world of difference when a game is almost playable. Just make sure that you're not limited by vram or temps first, otherwise it's practically useless to OC.
It does make a difference, depends heavily on the application, the hardware and the situation but very roughly speaking maybe like 10% difference in FPS. Though at the end of the day I tend to ignore stock clocks and pick the card with the better design and better cooling as you could just overclock it yourself.
Within the same generation, things like ROP (Render Output Unit) counts and memory performance (size and bandwidth) have a bigger impact than just raw GPU clock hz. Like if you were comparing a gtx980 to a gtx960 and imagining that they had the same clock rate, the 980 will win because of ROPs.
However, when you are looking at the same card (gtx980 to gtx980) you will usually find that the one with the higher clock rate will perform considerably better.
yes, for a given card, fps scales close to linearly with clock speed. Overclocking my 7950 from 960 to 1150 MHz is a nearly 20% increase in performance.
Take a look at some overclocking benchmarks and extrapolate.
I had 290s in crossfire that differed by ~100Mhz, no problems.