[GridIroN]

I find when I'm benchmarking and overclocking my 7970, it can be perfectly stable in the dedicated benchmark (that is presumably harder to run than a normal game as I usually don't use AA levels higher than 2 or 4 in a real game, but use 8x when stress testing), like Unigine Valley, or 3DMark, but will freeze, crash, or driver bomb after 10-15 seconds of a real game.

I was doing some overclocking last night, and noticed this. Actually, it was really bad last night. My card was stable in Valley at 1150 core, with 1.169'ish volts, but then I play a game that runs Cry3 engine and it bombs hard. Eventually I couldn't get it stable until I reduced vcore to 1125 and voltage to 1.159. I've noticed this all through out my overclocking/enthusiast "career" with all my cards, although, the GTX 570 didn't do this as often. Why does this happen?.

 

[DBEAU]

This is very common. There is no end all benchmark that is going to find instability better than everything else.

I can bench all day with heaven and 3dmark with certain settings and then crash minutes into a bf3 match.

Benchmarks are just a convenient way to test initial stability. You are stable when the programs you want to run are stable.

 

[GridIroN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DBEAU

This is very common. There is no end all benchmark that is going to find instability better than everything else.

I can bench all day with heaven and 3dmark with certain settings and then crash minutes into a bf3 match.

Benchmarks are just a convenient way to test initial stability. You are stable when the programs you want to run are stable.

But do you actually know why this is?

 

[Thracks]

Because every application loads different portions of the GPU in different ways.

 

[GridIroN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thracks

Because every application loads different portions of the GPU in different ways.

So, it basically comes down to coding..?

 

[Thracks]

What the developer is trying to render, and how they've programmed it to accomplish that goal both have an impact. For example, if you wanted to produce a certain kind of light on a character, there are many ways to accomplish that. All ways might look the same, but they'll each have a different impact on the GPU.

 

[GridIroN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thracks

What the developer is trying to render, and how they've programmed it to accomplish that goal both have an impact. For example, if you wanted to produce a certain kind of light on a character, there are many ways to accomplish that. All ways might look the same, but they'll each have a different impact on the GPU.

Ah, interesting. Thanks.