GPU not running at full clock in games

[Derpinz297]

I have overclocked my 3 780Ti's to about 1.2GHz, but when I'm playing games, it never seems to get that high. When I stressed tested my GPUs with AIDA64 however, I was getting full 1.2GHz speed at 100% load, same with CPU. I get good performance in most games, but in some I get 40-50fps average (noticeably Arma 3), which is strange for my system. I noticed that while playing Arma 3, my GPU load never got above 45% throughout, and the clock stayed at about 500MHz. My CPU also never got above 30% load and stayed at the default 3.6GHz clock rather than 4.4GHz which is what I overclocked it to. Why isn't the game using all of the resources available?

System specs:

i7 4960X @4.4GHz
64GB 2133MHz RAM
3x SLI 780Ti
1200 Watt PSU
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard

 

[bystander]

I assume you are talking about playing multiplayer. Arm3 is just massively CPU bottlenecked. The problem is you looked at the whole CPU and not the individual cores. Actually, even that is hard to do with your CPU, as Intel causes the threads to swap through the cores to keep temps down. Anyways, you have one thread that is likely maxed out, the one handling the draw calls, which feeds the GPUs. The GPU's are downclocking because they are not being used that much. If you go into the Nvidia control panel, you can put the GPU in performance mode under power management, but you will still be bottlenecked by the CPU due to how poorly the game multithreads.

 

[Derpinz297]

I assume you are talking about playing multiplayer. Arm3 is just massively CPU bottlenecked. The problem is you looked at the whole CPU and not the individual cores. Actually, even that is hard to do with your CPU, as Intel causes the threads to swap through the cores to keep temps down. Anyways, you have one thread that is likely maxed out, the one handling the draw calls, which feeds the GPUs. The GPU's are downclocking because they are not being used that much. If you go into the Nvidia control panel, you can put the GPU in performance mode under power management, but you will still be bottlenecked by the CPU due to how poorly the game multithreads.

Ok, thanks. It's unfortunate how it's the game's fault and nothing I can fix.