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.
Note that the version of GPU-Z that we used, v2.51.0 does not currently support the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. Therefore, take these readings with a grain of salt, we aren’t entirely sure which GPU frequency domain it is reading, the front side clock or the shader clock.
According to GPU-Z, the frequency starts off at a very high 2609MHz, but then drops to around 2569MHz and maintains a clock between 2510-2570MHz. Taking an average of the results, the average clock speed comes out to 2547MHz. According to the official specs, the Game GPU Clock is 2300MHz while the Boost GPU Clock is 2500MHz. Therefore, if GPU-Z is reading the “shader clock” correctly, the video card is boosting over the 2500MHz boost clock while gaming and maintains above that frequency on the made-by AMD video card. We can also see that it is quite dynamic, and doesn’t maintain a constant clock, it varies quite a bit.