{"id":4116,"date":"2009-03-17T21:45:13","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T20:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=4116"},"modified":"2010-03-31T12:50:29","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T11:50:29","slug":"nvidia-gtx260-bottleneck-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/nvidia-gtx260-bottleneck-investigation\/","title":{"rendered":"nVidia GTX260+ Bottleneck Investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/span> <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This article is another installment in the ongoing investigation of bottlenecking in video cards, with the first installment having been done on a 8800 Ultra<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To quickly recap on the basic premise: nVidia hardware allows separate core, shader and memory clocks. Therefore, underclocking one of these values while leaving the rest at stock allows you to find out what part of the GPU is the biggest bottleneck in any given situation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a limit to how far the core and shader clocks can separate from each other and in the case of the GTX260+, it\u2019s quite a small drop of 1242 MHz to 1153 MHz, or about 7%<\/span>. This is much smaller than the 8800 Ultra\u2019s possible drop of 19%, but it should still be possible to see some kind of differences.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll run the card at stock speed followed by underclocking each clock by 7%<\/span>, leaving the rest at stock, to see which has the most impact on performance. In addition to using a different video card this time, I\u2019ll also use a different selection of games with more modern characteristics overall than the last batch of games.<\/p>\n

The stock clocks are as follows: core 576, shader 1242, memory 999.<\/p>\n

The underclocked values with the corresponding colors are as follows: core 535<\/span>, shader 1153<\/span>, memory 927<\/span>, each with an underclock of approximately 7%<\/span>.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hardware<\/span> <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n