how much will lowering the clock speeds affect my framerates?

i've been getting artifacts every week or two, and i just got the game frontlines: fuels of war, and i get artifacts every time i play the single player in that game. someone on those forums suggested to turn my memory clock speed down (currently 975) and see what happens. but i have a few questions.

if i am going to turn it down, what should i turn it down to?

i only get severe artifacting in ffow, and i play much more demanding games like crysis a ton. is my graphics card overheating really causing this problem?

and also, how will turning the speed down affect my performance in games? like i max crysis (1280x800 and no aa of course) and on most sp levels i get 25-30fps. i dont want to go much lower than that.

thanks in advance guys

I don't know.... depends, I guess. Let me put it this way. When you overclock a stock GPU to it's highest value.... you usually gain about 1 - 5 FPS, in most cases. Download 3dmark06 and see for yourself.... http://www.futuremark.com/download/

My guess is that your problem has more to do with the video driver than anything else.... try an older driver or the latest driver if you're not already using the latest.... and see if that changes anything. Lot's of times Nvidia/ATI breaks compatiblility and then fixes it as they go from driver to driver....

well i have been using the latest release driver, but i got a suggestion to use the newest beta driver, so i downloaded it last night and installed before i went to bed. i guess i'll jump on now and see if it changes anything

UPDATE: alright well i got on and played for a good hour before i got this wierd bug where my monitor says its going to sleep (i guess it stopped receiving the signal from my graphics card). one hour is MUCH better than the 5-10 mintues i used to get, so i'll deal with it for now

ok, well i've been playing on and off all day, and i've noticed that when i play the mp of the game, i can only play for sessions of about 30-45 minutes, and then it does the thing where my monitor goes to sleep.

what is that anyway, and what does it mean?

ok, well i've been playing on and off all day, and i've noticed that when i play the mp of the game, i can only play for sessions of about 30-45 minutes, and then it does the thing where my monitor goes to sleep.

what is that anyway, and what does it mean?

chronogamer27

Sound like a heat problem, check all temps.. Mobo, CPU,GPU... (Ofc. not in idle, temp should be when ingame playing.)

You never mentioned what card you have....

If it's the video card that's overheating... you may be able to deal with it by using Rivatuner (don't remember the version number of the latest, it gets updated all the time.). It has manual fan settings (works with Nvidia and ATI), you can lock it to 90-100% fan and see if that makes the problem go away, but it's more of a band-aid than anything else.

Suggest visually inspecting the card to see if the heatsink fan assembly is lose or something. Don't really know how you would go about fixing it, if it is lose or broken, though.

Could just be that the card is dying.

well all the info is in my sig, but if you have those turned off, its an XFX 8800gt, but its some special OC'd edition (heres link to it on newegg). i do have rivatuner, and the fan speed is turned up to 70%.

right now the GPU is idle'ing at 48 C, and i'll update when i play later today and it eventually crashes. also whats a program to use to monitor motherboard temp? i use core temp for cpu and rivatuner for gpu, but what's a good thing for mobo temp?

alright, it took me a while to get on, but i played for a while and it crashed with the following temps:

CPU core 1: 54 C
CPU core 2: 47 C
CPU core 3: 53 C
CPU core 4: 49 C
GPU core: 63 C

i'm no expert with these things, but thats not exactly abnormal is it?

can anyone else help me out?

Ah, sorry... didn't see those. So those are the readings after the game has crashed and you get back to the desktop? Are you using a program that tracks the temps overtime, or is that just the reading when you get back to the desktop?

If you aren't having the temps monitored while your gaming, try and do that. I can't remember which program does it (Rivatuner?), but there's a free one that graphs your temps over time so you can see a full printout of your graphs for the last couple minutes.

It's possible your GPU temps are dropping back down to normal by the time the game completely crashes and you get back to the desktop to check 'em.

no no no by crash i mean i have to manually turn computer off.

the way i do it is have the temp readers on one monitor while im playing game on the other, and when game crashes i have 10 or so seconds before screen turns off to record temps.

so those are the temperatures at the exact time of the crash.

i'm starting to think that there isnt actually anything wrong with my graphics card, that its just something wrong with the game

Ofc. If youre fine in evry other game it´s not your hardware, then it´s the "one" game...

hmm... seems like a lot of people with the 8 series is having trouble with that game. It's probably the game....

http://forumplanet.gamespy.com/frontlines_technical_support/b67263/19740972/p1/?2

Or... maybe the game doesn't like quad processors?