RTX 4090: 98% Performance at 80% Power Target

[Blueberries]

From Der8auer's video on his English channel:

 

[N/A]

Strange, In order to get that kind of power saving voltage should drop to 900mV, which is 2300 Mhz according to the

The strange part is not the fact, but asking this question of power target not making sense after basically a life time of this being the case for all GPus ever made.

And whats with the wobbling fans.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Strange, In order to get that kind of power saving voltage should drop to 900mV, which is 2300 Mhz according to the
View attachment 265082
The strange part is not the fact, but asking this question of power target not making sense after basically a life time of this being the case for all GPus ever made.

And whats with the wobbling fans.

If this works anything like Ampere, the v/f curve is not necessarily fixed, i.e. 900 mV does not necessarily mean 2300 MHz, and this should be adjustable using MSI Afterburner.

By default, NVIDIA tends to overshoot maximum voltage in order to get an extra few MHz momentarily at the top end, but the performance is thoroughly unsustainable due to their strict power and thermal controls which the user cannot override without a BIOS editor (so, you can't do it since they are signed and you cannot edit them), especially when the graphics processor is under heavy load.

The sweet spot for my standard-power (2x8 pin, 375W) RTX 3090 is at 1800 MHz at 793 mV, this way it will run any workload including full tilt raytracing within its power limit without undesirable clock fluctuations. By default, it will hit ~1980-2025 MHz at 1.07 V momentarily and then throttle down, and given enough time well into the low 1400s under raytracing loads for extended periods of time, usually averaging the clock around the 1740 MHz that ASUS advertises as the boost clock for this model.

It's frankly terrible and the truth is, it's done this way because it tends to inflate benchmark scores (short/bursty workloads) and gives the illusion to the average joe buyer that their hardware is smart and always at its best no matter the situation, by tweaking itself constantly. I hate GPU boost, but alas, NVIDIA offers no way to disable it or any first-party performance control features. The best you can do is disable p-state control but the driver will override it regardless if power limit is reached.