Does clock speed matter?

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guymarshall

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Jan 25, 2015
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My fx 8350 runs at 4.0 GHz stock (4.2 GHz turbo) and gets over 70 fps in Far Cry 4 at 1080p ultra settings with an Asus GTX 970 at stock speeds. But when I underclock the FX 8350 to 1.4 GHz and lower the clock speed of the Asus GTX 970 by about 450 MHz, I still get 65 FPS.

70fps/65fps = 1.07 times less frames per second
whereas
4GHz/1.4GHz = 2.86 times lower clock speed.

This means that my computer fans are not even turned on when running at ultra settings at 1080p and yet I still get the same frames per second! Is there any reason why this is true? I thought halving the clock speed would halve the frame-rate and so on, but apparently it doesn't. I know about FLOPS, and is this something to do with it?
 
Solution
ESPclipse
Well that could infer that Far Cry is not terribly CPU intensive (though I do not know/have not played it), but if 1.4GHz across at most 4 of the cores is adequate to run the AI and engine objects, then the difference may be negligible. Try that with a very CPU intensive title, and that may no longer be the case
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ESPclipse

ESPclipse

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Well that could infer that Far Cry is not terribly CPU intensive (though I do not know/have not played it), but if 1.4GHz across at most 4 of the cores is adequate to run the AI and engine objects, then the difference may be negligible. Try that with a very CPU intensive title, and that may no longer be the case
 
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guymarshall

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Yeah I tried it with minecraft and the FPS more than halved, so I guess you're right that Far Cry 4 uses mostly the GPU instead of the CPU! :)
 
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warezme

warezme

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Clock speed does matter. In your case it could be on your system the bandwidth for the game data moving to and from your system(CPU) and to the video card(GPU), caps around 70fps for those settings and resolution. Lowering both doesn't change the rate significantly because there is still enough bandwidth to keep the frames up above 60. There can be many sources for a game bottleneck. The game may have an FPS cap, the video card may be to slow(narrow bandwidth), not enough processing power or not have enough memory to hold as much textures without swapping. The same with CPU's. To little megahertz and it isn't fast enough to process requests or to small a cache. Also your data sitting on a magnetic platter is limited to how fast it can access it becoming a bottleneck. There usually isn't one thing that can cause a game slow down.

Your system is probably already more than fast enough to handle this game so slowing it down is no big deal. You could try disabling VSYNC on the game and see how fast the GPU can push the framerate without worrying about synchronizing the frames. You may get tearing but the FPS should go up.
 
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ESPclipse

ESPclipse

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Yeah, parallel processing seems to be all the rage these days
 
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guymarshall

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And java is really badly optimised... If minecraft was on an engine that Far Cry 4 is on, the FPS will be OVER 9000!
 
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