Display Overclocking

With the GeForce Titan, NVIDIA introduces a new tweaking feature called "Display Overclocking". Yes, you heard right: you can now overclock your monitor. This kind of overclocking has technically always been possible and has often been called "non-standard display mode", but it was never integrated into the graphics drivers or promoted by a graphics vendor.

I'm sure you've seen a dropdown menu in your games, next to the resolution, that lets you select the refresh rate of the monitor. Unfortunately, most monitors report only one frequency, typically 60 Hz, so you are stuck with that particular choice.



Even when you disable V-Sync, the monitor will not display frames faster than this setting, and higher framerates may cause tearing, so many users opt to enable V-Sync. V-Sync has a major drawback in some games, causing input lag and reducing the perceived smoothness.



NVIDIA's new Display Overclocking feature lets you adjust the monitor's refresh rate - when supported. NVIDIA does not provide a software for Display Overclocking; board partners have to add support for this feature to their OC software. We used EVGA Precision for our testing.



As you can see, it's really basic. There is a slider, which lets you adjust the display refresh rate, and an apply button to try out the new rate.

Our test bench monitor is a LG 30" W3000H. It runs its native resolution of 2560x1600 at 60 Hz. When I increased the Hz step by step, the highest setting I could reach without affecting the picture was 75 Hz. Brightness beyond that point suddenly went up and the monitor started displaying random pixel noise. NVIDIA tells us that overclocking the monitor is perfectly safe. You will just get visual errors or a black screen if the monitor can't handle the setting, and I tend to agree.

Going from 60 to 75 Hz is not a huge improvement, but sideways movement looks a bit more fluid as long as your card can maintain that framerate.

I also tried overclocking our cheap 1080p displays that we use for multi-monitor testing. With their native 1920x1080 at 60 Hz, the maximum overclock ended up being 66 Hz. The monitor would show a distorted picture beyond 66 Hz before displaying an "out of range" message on a black screen. Unlike typical overclocking, it seems as though each monitor of the same model is limited to the same frequency. I tried the other two monitors I have and they topped out at 66 Hz too.



Last but not least, I tried my work monitor, a 30" Dell U3011. It runs the same 2560x1600 as on the LG 30"at 60 Hz. Here, display overclocking only reached a 65 Hz refresh rate.

Bottom line: your mileage will vary, but it's a feature that can turn out to be useful, especially if you are excited by 120 Hz monitors but lack the funds to get one.

One thing to note though is that I couldn't get display OC to work in full-screen mode, so you need to run windowed games. You use your normal desktop resolution, overclock the refresh rate using software, and start the game in a window (WOW's "Windowed (Fullscreen)" setting will work). The underlying issue seems to be that as soon as the monitor resolution changes, display OC is reverted because the mode change also causes a frequency change.

NVIDIA says Display Overclocking should work in full-screen, so it may just be a driver bug that can be easily fixed.