Default GPU Frequency
With both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, the GPU frequency is dynamic. NVIDIA has GPU Boost, and AMD has its Game Clock and Boost Clock quoted frequencies. Typically, GPUs today can exceed the “Boost Clock” dynamically. We need to find out what the GPU frequency is while gaming. To do this we will record the GPU clock frequency over time while playing a game. We use Cyberpunk 2077 for this with a very long manual run-through at “Ultra” settings recording GPU-Z sensor data.
In this first graph, we have Cyberpunk 2077 running at 4K and “Ultra” settings, which is a playable setting on the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. This setting does not bottleneck the video card, and the GPU frequency is allowed to run up to the full performance while gaming.
In this scenario, you can see that it starts off at 2760MHz, but after about a minute it drops down to 2745MHz and stays consistently there the entire time while playing. This is a very high GPU frequency, exceeding the rated Boost Clock of 2520MHz by 9% without doing anything. This is NVIDIA GPU Boost at work, dynamically utilizing all the power and thermal headroom it has to raise the clock speed, and with the RTX 4090 Founders Edition you get a pretty substantial GPU Boost while gaming when you are not bottlenecking the GPU. The fact that it remains a straight line, and is consistent, is important for a smooth gaming experience.
By contrast to the above graph, we wanted to show you this graph, where the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition is being a bit bottlenecked by running “Ultra Ray Tracing” at 4K in Cyberpunk 2077. The GPU is no longer able to maintain the full 2745MHz consistently. Instead, it fluctuates, as low as 2685MHz up to 2745MHz.
It’s still not a horrible result, but we just wanted to show you what to watch out for that will clue you into the game settings being a bottleneck for the GPU, even if it sometimes does feel “good enough.” Ultimately, you can get more out of the GPU frequency on the RTX 4090 FE if you keep the GPU in a nice sweet spot, and that means higher performance overall while gaming for the entire gaming session, but if you push it too hard, the clock speed will suffer.