I recently overclocked my 7850 from 1050/1225 to 1050/1300 and now my 3dmark 11 score went from performance 7429 to 7101. is this normal?
try upping the voltage a little bit, the memory may not be getting enough power.
In Catalyst, see that you the "power" slider is put to +20% in the overdrive section.
It sometimes resets when you apply an OC, causing the card to 'stutter' its performance.
(EDIT: I find this VERY annoying btw, if anyone has found a way to LOCK this in 20% please do tell)
@Egnappahz yes i think that might be the problem. does overclocking your memory clock effects performance substantially?
since you asked for it :) ;
What does a memory overclock do? It becomes more visible when you are using alot of video memory.
But what does use alot of memory? Higher resolutions and higher settings (not filters!). So if you are gaming at a low resolution at low settings (low textures & particle count, w/e) you wont see much. but when more texture/video memory is being used, a higher resolution clock will give more noticable gains.
Hope this clarifies a bit.
Thank you Egnappahz, i'm worried that my gpu would go haywire after i oc it. I returned it to the old setting and i am getting scores lower than 7400. What going on?
Overclocking memory is not as straightforward as it seems. Beyond a certain frequency (unique to each chip), you lose performance by increasing memory clocks. This is because GDDR5 is error-correcting, to some extent. If you push it too fast, it accumulates more errors and spends more time correcting them than if you run it at a lower speed and just don't have errors to begin with.
The result of this is that each video card has a certain memory clock which maximizes performance, and the only way to find it is to experiment. On my 7870, that's around 1375mhz. Beyond that, it loses performance.
That could be what's going on here.
Or. Maybe you just need to run your benchmarks multiple times and average the results before and after you change any clocks, if you weren't doing that already. Might just be some crazy anomaly, that you happened to lose performance.
Didn't knew that, with the memory clocks on my 7970, the performance goes up till it reaches a point where it (after a while) crashes.
I'll double check on your fact. Maybe it goes down at the end, I could be wrong.
Funny thing is i gained fps in tomb raider and crysis 3. I tested it on 3dmark 11 multiple times and it came out less than my 7400 score, even when i returned it to normal speeds.
I have no idea why 3dmark is being so unreliable Oo
turns out my scores are quite normal, other guys on the net (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/355801-33-7850-scores-3dmark11) got less scores than mine. i think it might be a glitch or my recent driver update (13.10 to 13.11).