Question Is is common to have to change your overclock on a GPU from game to game?

[Whoppsh]

Some games crash when I have my overclock set, while others do not.

What I've seem to noticed is that if a game isn't pushing the GFX card (90%+ load) It will crash on high overclock settings.

A good example is Path of Exile runs my card at 100% load 24/7. I'm currently running a GTX 980 Classified Edition with 100mhz core boost, and 500mhz memory boost. That game will run for as long as I play it without crashing.

But, when I play a game like League of Legends (around 40-60% GPU load) The game completely crashes, and messes up my overlock because the card had to recover from a crash, usually resulting in my restarting/reopening EVGA PX.

Is this common?
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[Eximo]

Yes. Different games utilize GPUs differently. Either through implicit code or differences between say DX11 and DX12.

Certain visual effects might use the memory more or less. Different textures loaded in (my suspicion here is one game uses more video memory than the other and some of that memory isn't completely stable at +500Mhz)

Simplest is to come up with a middle ground overclock that is stable in all your games.

For instance, when I was overclocking my current GPU the first time I bounced between CryEngine and Unreal engine titles. On a bench run I could run an offset of 120 or so, but in games I would get occasional crashes, dropped back to 109Mhz offset. On the memory I was running a 400Mhz offset, but again found occasional crashes, now it is 388Mhz or some nonsense. Then a few months later I went and bought a game running on the Unity engine, and had immediate problems. So I turn off the overclock completely for that title. (been a while, so they may have patched it out, I will have to sit down and try that sometime)

Interestingly I had zero issues with the notorious for finding instability Witcher III.