If you have a GPU and use it to render with Cycles or Eevee, there's a chance you could be leaving some increased performance on the table by not overclocking the cores. Even if your card is a TI or special edition OC card, you could potentially squeeze out faster performance in your rendering by overclocking the core speeds on the card, and unlike CPU overclocking it's very simple to do and completely safe. The reason I'm sharing this information is because I had never considered overclocking my GPU before until I saw a video on Youtube by JaysTwoCents where he shows just how easy it is, and anyone can do it.

It can be done right through software, and you could test things for yourself. A popular software package by MSI called Afterburner is the one I used for my Nvidia RTX 2070, and the performance gains I noticed immediate in my animation renders with both Eevee and Cycles with CUDA rendering. Here's what I found:

The base clock speed of my GPU out of the box was 1410 MHz with a boost clock of 1755 MHz on all 2304 Cuda cores. During my animation rendering with Eevee, before changing anything, I observed average clock speeds of between 1400MHz and boost of 1800MHz under load as each frame rendered. After applying a very conservative MSI Afterburner overclock profile of +140 on Core Clock and +200 on Memory Clock speed, I noticed the base clocks were immediately reporting around 1700 to 1800MHz base speed on average, with an outrageous boost up to 2000MHz during each frame! So what did that actually do for the render? Well, the results were quite impressive considering the subtle changes I did as a test. Overclocking the cores shaved over 1.5 seconds per frame off the animation, and sometimes I noticed over 2 seconds improvement from the previous render times on the exact same scene. Keep in mind, this is Eevee I'm using, so the frames had been already rendering at about 5 seconds per frame before the overclocking. After the overclock, the exact same animation was rendering at 3.5 seconds per frame, with some frames coming out at 2.77 seconds (the fastest I had monitored before was 4.75 seconds). Needless to say, this performance increase really adds up when you're rendering out over 1400 frames.

I haven't really done a monitored testing situation for Cycles yet, but I expect a decent improvement there as well if you are using the GPU as your render device. However, when it comes to Cycles keep in mind that it's possible to also include the CPU and GPU together. Doing this will likely skew the results of any GPU benchmarking since it's possible that your CPU can become a major bottleneck to each frame if your GPU is overclocked to the point where your CPU just can't keep up with the given tasks (such as denoising, if that's activated). I'd recommend only benchmarking the results with GPU only, not GPU/CPU combinations.

Anyway, there are some videos out there which can explain how to overclock better than I could. Typically, they're doing it to get a FPS increase in games, but faster clock speeds will also improve rendering speed in GPU render engines as well. Here's the video that inspired me to try this...

Thanks for sharing this Luxxeon I have never considered over clocking either mainly because was sure how all those setting worked and fear of going to far and damaging the card

Lobo3433 posted at 12:21PM Fri, 27 September 2019 - #4364367

Thanks for sharing this Luxxeon I have never considered over clocking either mainly because was sure how all those setting worked and fear of going to far and damaging the card

Yeah, that was my fear too. However, from all accounts I've read including those on the MSI pages itself, software overclocking on a GPU is perfectly safe. The only danger is overheating which all Nvidia cards are unlikely to do because they have a temp and power limit set in the bios to prevent that. So really there's no reason not to overclock at least a little bit and get some increase in performance. Depending on the GPU you have and if it's overclocked by default, results could be dramatic like mine were or just fractions of a second per frame.

I have a gigabyte card but I think that MSI afterburn seems more useful than the gigabytes overclocking software which is not as simple to understand

Ironically, JaysTwoCents just released a new video about overclocking again today. It's updated with the latest Afterburner software, which is free to use by the way. Afterburner is an MSI product, but it will work for any brand GPU card. Other solutions are out there, but as you pointed out they are typically more difficult to understand and use, which is why MSI's software is pretty much the standard. Keep in mind that some cards will see a much more dramatic result from overclocking than others, depending on the underlying architecture, the number of cores, and fan setup. Blower style graphics cards (like Nvidia's Founders Edition cards) are typically the worst at thermal control, but usually have the best clock speeds, while 3rd party like EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI usually have a much better fan design and open chassis to keep the card running cooler than Founder's Edition style cards. Here's a link to the latest video explaining how to use it in-depth:

I will take a look at it. Yes the MSI Afterburner software does seem more user friendly and seen it mentioned often in other areas as sort of the standard for over clocking GPU I have a Gigabyte card with some pretty heavy duty fans on it but I think going forward when I am ready to invest in my new card I might be going with one that I can integrate with my liquid cooling have seen some that already come pre built cards with liquid cooling face plates and such that has been my long term goals when I built my current system