I recently purchased a MSI Geforce GTX 770 and while I am playing FFXIV:ARR I have open hardware monitor open and I have noticed that it will underclock the GPU core, memory and shader frequencies. I know that is supposed to be a part of the GPU Boost 2.0 tech but when it underclocks itself it just drops Frame rate quite a bit and I just want to know if there is a why I can disable it while I am playing games so that the frame rate doesn't randomly drop like that.
It also seems to be the only game that I have noticed it happening in also if that helps at all
So I went into the control panel and there is an option for power preferences in the global applications settings and you can chose max performance to stop itself from underclocking during gameplay.
Yes it still allows itself to OC itself with Boost 2.0
You could make a profile for it on Nvidia Control Panel and force the card to run in "full speed mode". Just change the Power Management Mode from Adaptive to Prefer Maximum Performance. Start the Control Panel (right click on the desktop -> Nvidia Control Panel) -> go to Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings -> Add -> seach for FFXIV:ARR.exe and press ok -> go to Power management Mode and set it to Prefer Maximum Performance -> click on apply -> Done.
Is your card overheating while playing games? This could be why your GPU is slowing itself down. If so (and in addition to what Zombre mentioned), I recommend you create a custom fan profile in a program such as MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X to help keep temps under control.
For many games, especially if you have a high end card like the GTX 770, very few games are actually able to fully load it. Even with my GTX 760, games like TF2 will jump to 300FPS and the card will only rarely clock up to 1019MHz,
once in 3D mode, the memory will always clock to its full speed, but the GPU will dynamically adjust the clock speed to use the least amount of power to do what it needs to to.