I’ve managed to achieve a stable undervolt on a 3090 FTW 3 Ultra with 0.85v @ 1905Mhz which has resulted in better performance, 100watt less power useage and a drop in 10 degrees in temp on full load with zero hit to FPS and smoothness.
Before the undervolt I was often hitting the power limit and I believe the GPU would throttle resulting in occasion stuttering. With the undervolt I am no longer hitting this power limit window and things are running much smoother
When I Optimized my Gigabyte Gaming RTX3080 10D GPU via Nvidia Experience
The GPU usage was insane at 100%, 353 Watt ( of a GPU rated for 320 )
Other specs seen using ALT + Z & ALT + R were crazy high Too.
I had to UnCheck GeForce Experience from optimizing the game to get the Specs under Control & Back to Normal.
I also have Problems using Direct X 12.1 = some studders, Game quit on my when going in for a landing etc.
Yes, a mild under volt since day 1 along with 115% power envelope from day 1 also… much more stable clock speeds (around 1950 iirc, 3090FE) and substantially less bouncing off the limit and subsequent clock reduction.
I undervolt my 3080 to 0.9V at 1920MHz. This is rock stable and knocks about 70W power and 5C temp off stock settings, as well as giving me about 75MHz increase in core GPU speed, so a win all round.
I followed this tutorial to underclock my 3080 with MSI afterburner :
90% of my crashes disappeared (I used to get an unrecoverable black screen, sim crashed but otherwise the PC was still running fine in the background, voice chat on Discord would still work for instance)
I still have occasional MSFS crashes now, but they don’t have the same error codes in the Windows event logs, and they are simple CTDs with no black screen, and no reboot needed
I spent so long trying to get a stable undervolt on my 3080ti, but i found that no matter what i did, some apps would still throttle the clock speed. a good example jsut when testing, is the 3dmark timespy tests. first part (the demo) ran exaclty as expected, i.e. if you set a max freq at a certain coltage, it would basically meet that through almost the whole demo and work great…especialy if you limit it right down low while keeping clock as high as you can at a fairly low voltage…great…the subsequent 2 tests though, no matter what undervolt i set, it would ALWAYS throttle through the whole tests. Never get a stable clock speed. E.g. lewts say you set a max freq of 1900…it will get to a certain point in the test and go down to 1730…set it to 1800, same point in the test throttles down to 1730…at one point i THOUGHT i got it workign better by noting at which voltage point it was dipping/throttling and jsut settign the max i could at that point…but even then, even if you set it at 1730 for example, it’ll then jsut throttle down further at the same points in the demo.
in actual real world use, it would do the same…i.e. clock speed jsut fluctuates all the time…
so personally, I totally gave up trying to undervolt it…as all I was doing was limiting the max clock speed…running at stock, the average clock speeds are the same, temps are the same, power is probably a bit more, but it also reaches a higher max clock speed when it can.
and this is coming from someone who absolutely swore by undervolting on my previous cards…I think something changed either in the nvidia drivers, or in the afterburner software, because, for me at least, it jsut doesn’t behave as you#d expect it to anymore. getting a solid clock speed at a set voltage just doesn’t work how it used to.
Undervolting my 3090 XCultra saves me msfs. I am on an very conservative setting @0,9mV/1800Mhz but for good stabilty.
With the latest trick learned to run the card not on „maximum performance“ but on balanced instead (nvcp) I have average load around 80% with some peaks into the nineties but those are well intercepted by the now available headroom.
Temps in the low seventies and 300W power consumption.
Stable 27fps (locked) in VR with G2 with 100% render resolution, TAA, t-lod 400 and medium to ultra mix in the other settings.
Confused - You spend upwards of 1500-2000 dollars on a high-end graphic card to play games, and it’s not configured out of the box correctly??? Why is that? Does PS power it incorrectly? Or are the cards junk? Your conversation has convinced me to forgo getting a new system until fall, simply because of the “unknowns” surrounding this issue. Please for the sake of us former builders of PC"s, what is going on, why is it happening, and is this defect in card or PC? Is this just specific to one card manufacturer or is it through the whole spectrum of manufacturers of the RTX 3000 series?
Thank you in advance.
It’s just another way to optimize your GPU (AMD & NVidia) more precisely.
If a GPU can theoretically run better at a lower voltage, why don’t they come like this from the factory? Simple: Just like CPUs, the silicon can vary with each individual GPU. This means that some will tolerate different voltages and clocks better than others. Standard settings align with the average tolerance.
The answer lies in the special nature of msfs. Its not an casual game like cyberpunk or rdr2. These may be power consuming too but not in that brute force manner of msfs. Because of this the bioses of the gpu’s are set to be able to react on the flexible load of the common games with max fps.
Msfs acts different. It cookes the gpu with an constant 100% load with no time to rest. This is the point when undervolting comes on stage. Undervolting does its magic by limiting the power for the gpu as well as setting an limit for the clockrate. This leads to more consistent, maybe somewhat lower framerates but this gives you an much more comfortable feeling compared with this permanently swinging framerates. Second this gives you headroom. msfs tends to some heavy spikes that goes 20% above the average load and this spikes may cause crashes when there is no headroom.
But all at all you are right, its a shame that even the strongest available gpu is not able to run msfs out of the box with no problem and need a lot of tricks and tweaks and compromises there for.
Or positive said, there is still alot of potential for optimizing in msfs.
3080ti FE under water. I typically undervolt on other games but any undervolt produces instability for me on MSFS2020. I’ve noticed i get more consistent gameplay without using dx12.
I get random black flashes (lasting only miliseconds) that are only mildly annoying.
Everything on max/ultra except t-lod at 225. 1440x3440. FPS locked at 60. Low 50s for gpu and memory temps.
Does undervolting help the memory junction temperature as well? TBH my main GPU temp isn’t too worrying (Zotac 3090) but the memory temperature is regularly in the low to mid 90s in MSFS.
Yes, my GPU spins up to high usage in MSFS, and fans/temp into the 84C range. However, they are (I think in SU8) read that if game is minimized it will power down so the GPU can rest, like when I go to dinner or something. FSX currently does, don’t think XP-11 does. But my main concern is why is MSFS running so aggressively it’s a flight simulator, so “fast refresh rates” should not be issue here, well maybe at Mach 2 in F-XX plane, but still at those altitudes, really not a lot of scenery needing to be refreshed. They need to optimize this game, so it’s not such a hardware hog. I hope they do. It is some better since release, but more improvement needs to happen, at 30,000 feet, just not a lot to see, and one poster said, this game is really a VFR game, not and IFR game because of the visuals, hmmm, I bought it for the up-to-date avionics for airliners and large military cargo planes, maybe some rewriting needed to kind of give the best to both camps so to speak.
Just tried undervolting again and, at least with my system, it’s still “broken”. Can not get a stable/ constant clock speed/ voltage no matter what I do in afterburner.
It’s a gigabyte gaming oc 12gb 3080ti if that makes any difference?
I used the method shown in this video and it worked perfectly. As shown in the video, the important thing to do is to drop the whole voltage curve first by reducing the core clock 200-300 MHz before setting your desired voltage and clock speed point on the curve. When you apply it, the line should be pretty much flat to the right of your set point.
Here’s what my undervolt curve looks like on my 3080 (0.900V @ 1905MHz)
