a PC world fans Adam here with GPU expert Bret circus hello and we have a
weekly podcast called the full nerd and you can tune into it on YouTube
anywhere we're podcasts are listened to and on the show we answer all sorts of
questions from all of the lovely audience members but one of them that I
hear you get a lot and actually I'm curious about it too there there's
something called AMD boost clock versus NVIDIA no AMD
gamer clock versus Nvidia boost you got it right the second time that Oh close
to almost right that's how confusing I I'm confused by this please help me and
probably a lot of people out there tell us what it is and why and how they work
differently and if there's a better one so this is actually a question I get a
ton on Twitter AMD introduced a new concept called game clock with its new
Radeon rx 5700 series what I do 1440p graphics cards
so now AMD is reporting three different values when you you go okay I'm gonna
buy this AMD card how fast is it okay traditionally graphics cards will tell
you base clock and boost clock yeah bottom top AMD added game clock the way
it works is AMD's base clock is the minimum clock still what it is okay game
clock as you might guess from the name is the speed the minimum speed that the
graphics card is expected to run in gaming scenarios so so when it's it's
fully firing here's yes when you've got it loaded up when you're playing fire
cry when you play in battlefield when you're playing anything that hammers
that GPU that's the frequency range you can expect that GPU to function in okay
it's rated around the reference blower designs oh the reason is the minimum
frequency is because as you get custom cards that have more efficient coolers
they can keep the temperatures down you need other card can run hotter faster
better or longer it might be higher but game clock is what you should expect to
see that that card running in gaming scenarios boosts clock is it's
theoretical like peak clock almost yeah yeah so like if you're doing some
that just means the GPU for a split second that's as high as I can go this
but that that's different than overclocking right because that boost
clock can go higher if you're overclocking it or if you overclocking
is completely different overclocking is you doing your own stuff to make it run
faster than it should be rated for it this is just rate to specifications the
real confusing part about it though is that
AMD's terminology is different than nvidias because what you do and NVIDIA
has been using boost clock forever yeah and it's not the top clock like what AMD
is saying in videos boosts clock is basically the same way the aim DS game
plot functions so the low end of a game that's performing yep so in videos boost
clock boosts clock comes out say it's 1900 megahertz that's what you can
expect to see you're running in games this boosts clock going it can and in
recent video generations pretty much always does go faster ok so it works
just like the game clock they just call it something different they don't report
the maximum speed like AMD does they don't have their boost clock is this is
what we expect it to be in heavy loads like games it can go faster interesting
yeah so essentially the if I got this right you try to recruit eight this the
minimum the base clock is if you're just kind of letting one's idle right but
just sitting there bottom line but it's not gonna be that in gaming so the range
of motion you're gonna have in gaming is gonna be the game clock the game clock
for Radeon yeah for Radeon boosts clock clock for NVIDIA but you don't know the
top end of Nvidia you just know one number where AMD you have the range
between yes the low-end of gaming yes it's very simple but it's very
complicated it's better that is very common especially if you try to add in
overclocking or there's something so okay so is that another thing to keep in
mind though is that not all megahertz not all frequented now clock speeds are
the same so for that reason I meant list of the best graphic cards for PC
gaming on PC WorldCom and you know only two is in the description I updated
several times a month in there we keep up to date recommendations for every
both budget and display resolution because those are the two important
things so check out that or any other reviews or something before you buy a
graphics card the numbers on the box aren't the end-all be-all true yeah you
want to see real-world performance the numbers you know or just theoretical
question I'm sorry I'm stuck on this overclocking thing so say you've got the
the three numbers but we're just gonna look at game clock for AMD right you've
got that that game clock and then you have the boost clock if you're if you're
overclocking the card are you moving just the top number or
are you moving both numbers up moving everything up oh you can go faster yeah
when you overclock in the base clock even the base clock goes up it's like a
rising tide basically AMD makes it real easy to do that you have to click
through scary-looking warnings but if you go into the Radeon settings tool you
know right click on your desktop select Radeon settings there's a section in
there called wot man Radeon wot man and they actually will auto overclock your
graphics card yeah your your core clock and your memory for you it makes it nice
and easy it doesn't get as aggressive as it could be if you're an expert who
knows what you're doing it can manually dial it in then give you a nice little
boost to you know to your speeds for okay you know 30 seconds worth of work
when you overclock it increases the temperatures and it increases the power
consumption so just something to keep in mind if you have a decent aftermarket
cooler or custom cooler you should be good to go anyway especially with these
modest auto over clocks in videos more current
generations GTX 10 series GTX 20 series and I guess the GTX 16 series I guess
you would call it the non ray-tracing cards all their partners like MSI EVGA
etc they put out overclocking software and they also have one-click
overclocking functionality so it's actually a lot easier to do than ever
before and even if you don't know anything about it I recommend everybody
go in there and do it awesome cool which would render these numbers that were so
confused about even more obsolete oh just make them faster any
well luckily you write about this stuff on PC WorldCom definitely go check out
those articles check out reviews like you said the the number on the box is in
the end-all be-all there's definitely other ways that you kind of need to look
into that information but really thank you for kind of explaining this to me
because I really did not have any idea and I think I have a somewhat firm grasp
on the subject now whenever people ask me on Twitter I'll just send them the
video it's great there you go perfect and you can definitely tune in to the
full nerd every week on youtube subscribe here anywhere your podcasts
get disseminated through the internet and subscribe there and thank you
Bradford for answering this question for me I appreciate it anytime and thank you
for showing up we'll see you later