Found a workaround for uncontrollable GTX 1080 downclocking / throttling

Message boards : Number crunching : Found a workaround for uncontrollable GTX 1080 downclocking / throttling
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Profile Dr Grey

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Message 1835360 - Posted: 11 Dec 2016, 11:57:56 UTC

Since getting my EVGA GTX 1080 FTW I have had trouble getting it to sit reliably at a set overclock. Neither MSI's Afterburner or EVGA's Precision tools would work in enabling a constant overclock when running SETI. The card always had a tendency to downclock to 1721 MHz, occasionally bumping up to whatever overclock I had set it to without any apparent cause but always coming back down again, spending the majority of time at the lower clockspeed. I could sit and watch it on GPU-Z and there didn't seem to be any correlation of these jumps with BOINC activity - it wasn't happening with WU's starting and finishing. It's not temperature related as the card would be sitting in the low 70 C range if the overclock was being met, dropping to low 60s C at the downclock. It would also drop the voltage as it downclocked.
It looks like Nvidia's GPU Boost has been deciding that not much was going on, despite GPU-Z saying the GPU load was 98-99 %, and dropping the card into a lower power draw state. Changing 'power management mode' under Nvidia control panel/manage 3D settings to 'Prefer maximum performance' had no effect. All very frustrating and Googling the issue found a number of threads out there where other folks are encountering this with no solution being found.
I was considering seeing if changing the thread priorities would have an effect but I hadn't figured out how to do that yet, but anyway I might have found a way to force GPU Boost to stop the card from being so lazy.
In Nvidia control panel there's the 'Adjust Image Settings with Preview' menu item with the preview window showing a rotating Nvidia logo. Last night I was finding that just opening that setting pushes the card into its high power state. When I closed the panel the card would drop down to 1721 MHz again. You can even pause the animation and minimise it and the card will remain at full power. So I left it in that state over night, finding this morning that the card will sit at full power regardless of whether the panel is open or not - which is a bit weird. Whether this condition will survive a reboot or not I don't know, but I thought I'd put this out there in case anyone else is having this issue and wants to try it.
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Message 1835375 - Posted: 11 Dec 2016, 15:23:52 UTC - in response to Message 1835360.  

I see similar behaviour on my new 1050ti, and noticed if I was watching youtube or twitch streams the boost clock would return.
Some digging, I came across the 'no load limit' on msi afterburner, which matched the clock switches.

My 'feeling' is that Cuda & OpenCL compute only, aren't completely using the GPU (obviously not the dedicated for graphics parts anyway), so whatever algorithm they use, presumably in the driver, isn't necessarily what we'd want.

Interestingly I fired up a minimalist Vulkan sample, which uses almost no load by itself (and the clocks drop to a very low power state i f not crunching), however while running 2 Cudas by themselves it seems to be enough. Keeping this running minimised in the task bar appears to sustain the boost clock.

Might think about making something a little more appropriate/unobtrustive to keep those clocks alive.
"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.
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Message 1835387 - Posted: 11 Dec 2016, 17:42:45 UTC - in response to Message 1835375.  

Thanks Dr. Grey for that information...

Seems like someone else had said something similar to me in the past when one of my 1070s was underclocking (I eventually RMA'ed that card due to other issues). Can't remember who it was. But I totally forgot about it until you mentioned it again.

Probably something I should post on a sticky somewhere.

Zalster
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Message boards : Number crunching : Found a workaround for uncontrollable GTX 1080 downclocking / throttling


 
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