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.
The default GPU Boost clock on the GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition is 2505MHz. On our Founders Edition the video card started at 2790MHz, but then quickly dropped down to 2775MHz and stayed there for the entire time, creating a consistent clock speed performance range. This is a pretty big boost over 2505MHz, it’s an 11% boost in clock speed just from the native NVIDIA GPU Boost on the Founders Edition. At that clock speed, we wonder how much more headroom there really is, GPU Boost already seems to be boosting the frequency quite a bit on its own.