Why is Ashes so picky about overclocks?

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

So I recently purchased a Gigabyte Waterforce 980 Ti. I overclocked it to 1600 MHz core and 8000 MHz memory, with a custom BIOS hitting just under 1.3v.

 

Every single game I play is stable. I've played nine hours or so of Star Wars Battlefront, the entire campaign of Crysis 3, five hours of Rocket League, and survived countless runs of Unigine Heaven and 3DMark Firestrike. The only thing that crashes my GPU is Ashes. I can make it anywhere from one to five minutes into a game before it gives up.

 

I know the answer to the crashing is to just lower or disable the overclock. I'm not looking for a solution to the crashing. I'm just curious what about this game causes the problem when every single other application doesn't.

 

The troubleshooting page says this game, being DX12, pushes the hardware more. I'm getting crashes in the DX11 and DX12 versions. I have a liquid cooled GPU with an aggressive fan curve, keeping it under 60c at all times. That is excluding the back of the card, since it is just an AIO cooler that happens to run copper heat pipes over the VRMs on the front.

 

I have also played Star Citizen, another DX12 title, with no crashing. The only weird thing I've noticed from Ashes is that the %TDP sensor runs a little high. I occasionally saw power perfcaps, which seems odd considering the BIOS I'm running and the fact that my card has dual 8-pin power inputs.

23,941 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Short answer: because ashes pushes your hardware a lot Harder.

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

(Star Citizen is not a DX12 game yet)

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Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I see. I guess I'll just have to lower it. A shame, really. 1600 really scratched that OCD itch in the back of my mind. It's a nice, round number.

 

Thanks for the info. Also nice to know Star Citizen isn't DX12 yet.

 

I'll see if I can get it stable with 1580-1590 this afternoon and report back how it goes.

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Quoting jrgray93, reply 3

1600 really scratched that OCD itch in the back of my mind. It's a nice, round number.

haha, I know what you mean. Once you've got it stable I wonder how much of a difference it will make. 1 or 2fps? So not a biggie hopefully. Might need to be some kind of gentle warning on the game though as I think a lot of GPU overclockers have had this problem. Perhaps just a pinned thread in the forums around release time. This build may not be the best to test stability on though as it is relatively crash prone. 

Reply #5 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

True. I might explore bumping it back up to see what happens once we get a nice 1.0+ release. But hey, seems stable at 1575. Now I'm just getting CTDs with no error in the event viewer, so I doubt that's my GPU overclock. I'm reinstalling. Hopefully just some fluke. Otherwise, I'll follow some other troubleshooting steps.

 

Despite annihilating my hardware, the game maintains a respectable 65+ FPS in every situation I've managed to make it to so far. By comparison, StarCraft 2 can dip below 60 FPS with far less happening. Got to appreciate the modern tech behind this game in comparison to what the drawn-out development process of that game gave us.

Reply #6 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Here's a way to think about it:

 

Imagine your graphics card having 10 cores on it (just making up a number).

Now, normally, a game will use 1 of those cores really hard.  

To get more perf, you overclock it so that that 1 core gets boosted further.

But ashes will use all 10 cores. 

Let's say that each core produces 1 unit of heat and that 15 units of heat will cause the card to crash.

And let's say that when you overclock your card that each core now produces 2 units of heat.

Normally, no big deal. 1 core used X 2 = 2 units of heat.

But if your'e using 10 cores that pushes it over the edge.

However, you can probably still run on DX 11 and not have a problem.

Reply #7 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Makes sense. I can tell it's pushing it harder than most applications. Peaked at 64°C once I got it stable at 1575 MHz and played a bit. I have an aggressive fan curve and nothing has passed 60°C prior to this.