Question GPU requires underclocking for DX12 and Vulkan game engines

[frugalunrecovery]

Hey All - this is a unique one. I have had an RTX 2060 for a few years. The first thing I noticed with the card was that RTX features would crash instantly. I brushed this aside as RTX wasn't too important to me at the time.

It has a unique issue I noticed when games started being DX12 or Vulkan exclusive. To get the game to not crash I would have to underclock my gpu 200-400Mhz via afterburner.

I had never seen anything like this before behavior wise and have tried many things over the years. I have tried different PSU, CPU, rolling back drivers, overclocking instead of underclocking. Nothing seems to resolve this issue.

The games I play are primarily dx11 and so this hasn't been a pressing issue, but i'm now wanting to fix this. My question is, should I upgrade my MOBO before purchasing another GPU? I don't want to sidegrade GPU to fix this issue and then be stuck!

Thanks.

 

[rgd1101]

full system spec? include brand and model of the psu

 

[frugalunrecovery]

full system spec? include brand and model of the psu

MOBO: AB350 Rev 1 (latest firmware installed, F51H)
GPU: RTX 2060
CPU: Ryzen 7 5700x
RAM: Vulcan 32GB DDR4 3600mhz Ram
PSU: There are two i've used. First is Corsair TX850M, second is Thermaltake Smart 700W. The thermaltake is new out of the box installed this morning
Drives: 1x Nvme SSD, 2x HDD, 1x SSD

Running latest Win10

 

[Avro Arrow]

Honestly, I've never heard of such a thing before. It's possible that the RT portion of the card (Tensor Cores) have defects that don't allow it to run at stock clocks. I don't know when you bought the card but when RT crashed, you should have RMA'd the card because it shouldn't do that.

Having said that, it doesn't really matter because the RTX 2060 is a ray-tracing card in name only. A lot of people got hoodwinked by nVidia with this "RTX" prefix.

When it came to producing cards like the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 that could do ray-tracing, somebody should've said this to Jensen Huang:

A GeForce card with the GTX prefix cannot do hardware-accelerated RT. A GeForce card with the RTX prefix can do hardware-accelerated RT but that RTX prefix doesn't mean that the card is going to be any good at it. Your RTX 2060 is a good case-in-point as its RT performance is inferior to that of the RX 6600 XT, a card that people buy only if they don't care about RT performance. It's basically useless for RT.

Ray tracing only really becomes something that you can use at 1080p consistently with something like an RTX 3080 because even though an RTX 3070 Ti is technically capable of it, its small 8GB VRAM frame buffer can cause problems.

I would just ignore ray-tracing if I were you. Hell, I've been ignoring it with an RX 6800 XT, a card that is vastly more capable of it than the RTX 2060. I've even been ignoring it with my RX 7900 XTX, a card that has amazing RT performance on par with the RTX 3090 Ti and has more RAM than most gaming PCs.

RT is just not an impressive enough technology to go crazy for... yet. One day it will be a must-have but today is not that day. It robs too much gaming performance from video cards, requires more VRAM than most cards have and while it does look good, it doesn't look good enough to significantly improve your gaming experience. After all, if you're looking for an enemy to fight or looking around to make sure that nothing's hunting you, you're not going to stop and look at your reflection in a puddle or notice how well-structured the lights and shadows are.

I've never played it but I've seen a Daniel Owen video in which he states that when playing Resident Evil Village, turning on RT actually makes things look worse (I'm not kidding).

 

[frugalunrecovery]

Honestly, I've never heard of such a thing before. It's possible that the RT portion of the card (Tensor Cores) have defects that don't allow it to run at stock clocks. I don't know when you bought the card but when RT crashed, you should have RMA'd the card because it shouldn't do that.

Having said that, it doesn't really matter because the RTX 2060 is a ray-tracing card in name only. A lot of people got hoodwinked by nVidia with this "RTX" prefix.

When it came to producing cards like the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 that could do ray-tracing, somebody should've said this to Jensen Huang:

Just because a card is a GeForce RTX doesn't mean that it's going to be any good at RT. Your RTX 2060 is a good case-in-point as its RT performance is inferior to that of the RX 6600 XT, a card that people buy only if they don't care about RT performance.

Ray tracing only really becomes something that you can use at 1080p consistently with something like an RTX 3080 because even though an RTX 3070 Ti is technically capable of it, its small 8GB VRAM frame buffer can cause problems.

I would just ignore ray-tracing if I were you. Hell, I've been ignoring it with an RX 6800 XT, a card that is vastly more capable of it than the RTX 2060. I've even been ignoring it with my RX 7900 XTX, a card that has amazing RT performance on par with the RTX 3090 Ti and has more RAM than most gaming PCs.

RT is just not an impressive enough technology to go crazy for... yet. One day it will be a must-have but today is not that day. It robs too much gaming performance from video cards, requires more VRAM than most cards have and while it does look good, it doesn't look good enough to significantly improve your gaming experience. After all, if you're looking for an enemy to fight or looking around to make sure that nothing's hunting you, you're not going to stop and look at your reflection in a puddle or notice how well-structured the lights and shadows are.

I've never played it but I've seen a Daniel Owen video in which he states that when playing Resident Evil Village, turning on RT actually makes things look worse (I'm not kidding).

That's the thing, I don't care less about the RTX features. Just provided that info in case it was relevant or indicative or a failed card.

The main thing is that because it can't handle DX12 and Vulkan im concerned the card is underperforming in general / want it to work as the game i play is much better optimized on DX12/Vulkan and underclocking feels wrong LOL

So your gut instinct is that this thing was failed from the jump? I wouldn't be surprised since I play older games and I wouldn't have tested its limits aside from that unboxing RTX fun time.

 

[frugalunrecovery]

and also to add on, I work in IT and have discussed this with coworkers and nobody has any clue WHY a card would just crash on dx12 / vulkan if it runs fine on normal clock dx11... aside from it being too heavy a load. So I empathize with your statement that it doesn't make sense.

I didn't believe it for a while because it seemed impossible, but it's the only thing I can reproduce. "This game doesn't run? bet its dx12. time to underclock so i can get in settings to set to dx11".