Radeon RX 7900 XTX Overclocked Graphs
At the graph above, we are first looking at the Front End Clock Frequency. By default, this should be running around 2500MHz, as per the spec. In reality, while gaming, it starts off pretty high, and then falls to between 2720MHz-2810MHz. This is the default behavior of the Front End Clock, which averages out to exactly 2786MHz without overclocking. Now, when we enabled the 3300MHz Max Frequency slider above, you can see how the overclock compares to this. It starts high and then settles between 2870MHz-2920MHz. The exact average of the overclock turns out to be 2897MHz for the Front End Clock. Therefore, on the Front End Clock, we got a 111MHz or a 4% increase for the Front End Clock.
In this graph above we are now looking at the Shader Clock Frequency, which should run at around 2300MHz according to the spec. We can see, however, that while playing games it actually boosts to between 2550-2600MHz at default. The exact average of this clock speed turned out to be 2578MHz. When we overclocked the Max Frequency slider to 3300MHz we can see with the orange line how the overclock compares to the default performance. We now see the overclock for the Shaders around 2640MHz-2700MHz. The exact average of the overclock on the Shaders is 2661MHz. Therefore, the overclock has increased the Shader Clock by 83MHz or 3%.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU Only Overclock
It is very important to keep in mind that this is all with the memory also overclocked to 21GHz. As we mentioned, if you do not overclock the memory at all, you can actually achieve a higher Front End and Shader Clock Frequency. We went ahead and ran our tests to also find out what overclocking the GPU alone, without the memory would result in. In the table below, we are going to compare the GPU Overclocked Alone frequencies, with the GPU and Memory overclocked results we just showed above so you can see how much more you can eek out of the GPU if you don’t touch the memory at all.
| Average Clock | Default | GPU and Mem OC | GPU Only OC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front End MHz | 2786MHz | 2897MHz | 2947MHz |
| Shader MHz | 2578MHz | 2661MHz | 2703MHz |
From this, you can see that if we only overclock just the GPU, where it is not as power throttled, the Front End Frequency can almost hit 3GHz average, almost. It does peak at 3GHz, in fact, our highest peak was 3008MHz, which only lasted a few seconds, then it falls into the 2900’s. Still, with just the GPU overclocked the Front End has a 161MHz or 6% overclock. The Shader Clock has a 125MHz or 5% overclock.
For our final results today, however, we opted for the balanced overclock where it is overclocked on both GPU and memory, so we settled for the results shown in the graphs above and the memory at 21GHz for our performance comparisons in the graphs to follow.
Discussion (9 replies)
Join Discussion →Thanks, @Brent_Justice for the OC review. Wow! A lot to unpack with this one with the new overclocking method that was needed. It's so awesome seeing the 7900 XTX really trading blows with the RTX 4080 and 4090. It definitely puts up a heck of a fight. Interesting too to see how they all share in the diminishing returns of extra power used vs performance gains. Still, though, my hat is off to AMD for such a nice card and I can't wait to see what they surpass it with.
Nice job. I don't tend to push my hardware much - thanks to you if a 7900xtx is ever in stock at msrpi can push it if I need to.
You would think a circa 2005 game at 4k wouldn't strain my 6900xt. The 7900xtx should do much better.
Same here... I just upgraded from a 6900xt to 7900xtx to try and keep my framerate locked at 160fps on my 3840x1600 ultrawide on the only game I really play, Path of Exile. 1% CPU utilization, 99% GPU utilization. ?♂️ Still can't lock it 100% of the time. The quest continues.
Depends on the game - a lot of them aren't terribly well optimized and can make anything struggle a bit, especially if you are a stickler about maintaining 60/120FPS rock solid
I play Rift a lot, it's 10+ years old now. 60% of the time it sits at 144Hz, but if I'm in a hub area or in a raid my 3080 can struggles to maintain 60, and I see it dip into the 40's on occasion. Not because the card is slow, just because the game isn't terribly well optimized (most MMOs aren't, especially when you get a lot of people in one area). Thankfully, MMOs aren't nearly so sensitive to dips in FPS, and with VRR I tend to not even notice any more unless it gets really bad.
I have a feeling that certain games are just going to be that way until the hardware is ludicrously overpowered for the software (and I would argue an Ampere card certainly qualifies as much faster than anything the developers intended to be running the game in my example)
Anyone have thoughts on pushing the best 4k fps with City of Heroes? I was lagging and down to 30-35 fps in a recent itrial. My monitor only does 60hz so I don't ask for much.
Wow you're running COH on a 5950 off of NVME with 128 gig of ram and a 6900xt and you are dipping down to 35 fps. I'm thinking it's a game engine limitation at this point rather than a hardware limitation. If I remember correctly isn't COH a 32 bit process so it can't use more than 4 gig of ram? And I'm betting it's only hitting a few of your cores. Honestly other than more straight light single threaded speed I don't think you're going to eek more out of that engine than what you have? Maybe with one of the new intel procs able to hit 6ghz?
Pretty much, just to ensure I am clearly communicating, under most circumstances COH is ay 60 fps. I get the drops when on a melee character in league (more than 1 team of 8) situations. COH has a lot of flashy powers with their own visuals and sounds. I recall some discussion, a few years back, about updating the code to x64, I dont recall if that actually happened. Hmmm just launched it and see it is x64 in task manager. You are correct about it doing most of the work on one thread with 2 more that get some use and a few more that get minor use. (according to a forum post on the homecoming site by a dev). Its hard to tell if I am running into a CPU (single core) wall or GPU wall.
CoH is ancient and maintained by volunteers who reverse engineered the engine. It’s a minor miracle that it runs at all, let alone as well as it does
Does undervolting help in increasing clock speeds ?