I set up darkcoin mining rigs, and all of mine did.
Frankly, I don't believe you did any experimental testing, and I doubt you even understand what you are talking about.
Your chart suggests memory made a major difference! If you can't see your own chart supports my argument, talking to you is a waste of time.
What? You are the one not understanding anything. I'm not saying overclocking the memory is a waste of time (I never did).
I'm saying that increasing core clock is without a doubt the highest priority, and especially for gaming (which my original comment was about as well). Of course there are gains (Again, already said this), but you are wasting potential core clock and boost clocks by doing so, parameters that
WILL increase performance much more.
Would you take a maximum performance boost of 7% or 19%? Again, the 980 is the absolute best example of this since it already has a small bus-width to a powerful GPU.
Well, I mined Dogecoins and random alt-coins at the time. I had every incentive to test. And so far your argument is non-existent, atleast I have presented some actual data instead of pure speculation and guessworks
We already know what OCing core on 1080 does...and it's not spectacular. Without mem OC you're missing a few percent (about 5 if you have good chips). The only thing wasting boost clocks is nvidia's artificial limitation. OCing mem brings the perf increase up to near parity with the percentage of core increase.
So...guess what? Faster memory is needed or it won't scale.
Yes, thanks for that proof. I can totally see it now.