How to Force Max clock speeds (ATI Cards)

[Targ]

CLOD for now will not ramp up to 3D speed unless you force max clock speed via the CCC in the tray bar.
This is for Crossfire and duel GPU core ATI owners, I am not sure if this is an issue for single card/GPU ATI owners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4uNfWI6TiE

[Triggaaar]

AMD cards don't appear to be running at full clock speed. Instead of about 850 MGHz they're sitting at 500 MGHz despite being run at 100%.

That youtube clip doesn't work for me, there's no option to force maximum clocks.

[GHarris]

For what little it may be worth, my single 5870 appears to be correctly running at full clock speeds. I too had the impression that this was an issue mainly affecting Crossfire/SLI users.

[Triggaaar]

Originally Posted by Tanner

So maybe not as issue for single GPU cards.

I have a single card, and like other users are finding, it is sticking at 500 MGHz

[Codex]

From the 4xxx series onwards all ATI cards will automatically clock down to save power when not being used in a full screen DX or OpenGL app / game.

I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure that if you ALT-TAB out of game the card(s) will power down which may explain why you'll see the clock speeds lower than max.

They should go back to maximum when the game is running in full screen mode again.

Using AMD Overdrive you can force the card(s) to run at full or overclocked speeds all the time no matter what type of app or resolution your using.

Also don't be fooled when you've got two GPU's in Crossfire mode, one card will always run higher than the other when idle, but both will fire up when you run a game. Unless of course you "Overdrive" them.

[Mabroc]

I got a brand new Radeon 6950 2GB (I upgrade for CoD) and Im having this problem, the game is not clocking the core and the memory at the stock full power Mhz, the values are those of the desktop.

You can check the values (and others like temp and GPU load) with GPU-Z.0.5.2, start the sensors, play 20 seconds and ALT+TAB to check them (they will go down to desktop level if working properly, but you can see the graphic chart). When using any other game (I tried 3 or 4 with this card) the chart show the throttle up in game and the throttle down when ALT Tabbing to desktop.

For now Im using MSIAfterburner overclocker utility that show current values and a nice graphical chart to Overclock the core and memory Mhz by 1 Mhz only, no risks that way. I put 801mhz as core and 1251mhz as memory clock and press apply button, then go into the game (im not using the option to remember the OC with every boot). When I ALT+TAB to check after playing Im seeing the correct throttling up to those values when in game in the chart.

So is a BUG!!!!! Some ATI cards show it and others dont, Im using Windows 7 32bit (still working on a 64bit install on other partition) with the 11.3 Catalyst driver.

I see the potential of the sim, but all the little bugs and cumbersome menues, controls setup for joystick, etc are driving me mad. We need a lot of sandpaper

[Targ]

Originally Posted by Codex

From the 4xxx series onwards all ATI cards will automatically clock down to save power when not being used in a full screen DX or OpenGL app / game.

I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure that if you ALT-TAB out of game the card(s) will power down which may explain why you'll see the clock speeds lower than max.

They should go back to maximum when the game is running in full screen mode again.

Using AMD Overdrive you can force the card(s) to run at full or overclocked speeds all the time no matter what type of app or resolution your using.

Also don't be fooled when you've got two GPU's in Crossfire mode, one card will always run higher than the other when idle, but both will fire up when you run a game. Unless of course you "Overdrive" them.

You assumed that I am alt tabbing out of the game. What made you assume that?

Many people with duel GPU cards and crossfire have reported the card does not ramp up to 3D but stays at 2D clock speeds.

I have 2 monitors and keep CCC open on one to monitor while in game.

[Phazon]

The bug is present for single AMD cards as well. My HD4870 does not clock up at all for Cliffs of Dover, and it is the only game it has ever done this with. As noted above, this can easily be shown using GPU-Z and sensor logging. This is using the latest 11.3 drivers.

Using Overdrive in the CCC will not work. It does not disable PowerPlay which is what controls the up/down clocking feature of the card. I'm not fully aware of the extra driver features available for Crossfire users but for single-card users this will not work at all.

The main workaround for single-card users at the moment is using a third-party overclocking utility like MSI Afterburner. It has to be a utility that is capable of overriding PowerPlay with custom clock settings. I also found with Afterburner you had to set clocks with a 1Mhz difference to get it to apply.

Anyways this is a significant issue that has yet to be officially acknowledged. The US launch is getting closer and even more AMD users will be playing the game. It needs to be fixed soon.

[tjhowse]

I encountered this problem running windowed games. It would not kick my HD4870X2 into full speed unless I was running a full-screen game. You can disable the power-saving crap by editing the profile file and changing some settings. My card runs at max speed 100% of the time now.

Edit:
Win7: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles\nop owersaving.xml

I changed all the "Want_0" values to be the same as the "Want_1" values. You could also try playing with:

<Feature name="ForceHigh3DClocks">
<Property name="ForceHigh3DClocks" value="Disable" />
</Feature>

P.S. There's a chance you could fry your card, be careful what you change.

[Armatian]

It's very difficult that the card downclocks if it has work to do, performance on modern gpus it's very delicated, example: pes2011, doesn't use more than 25% of my gpu, and i had mad stutter, vsync on. Incredibly, it was because frame skipping was turned on, while frame skipping is intended to keep everything running in real time, it severly downgraded my performance.
Unluckily, it seems we would need patience from both developers of cod and amd driver team.
I need extra doses of patience, since my damn ptc doesn't deliver my money, exactly 50U$S after 14000 clicks i've made last year preparing to buy cod -_-