Overclocking Both: GPU and Memory

When I overclocked both the graphics processor and memory, I got a very perceptible speed boost:

This is how it looks in percents:

ATI RADEON 9800 PRO was overall better at overclocking than NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, yielding from 24% to 31.7% speed increase.

The results suggest that the overclocked ATI RADEON 9800 PRO card shows its best with enabled anisotropic filtering. In this case, the performance of the graphics card is mostly determined by the core speed, and we have enough of this – extreme overclocking gave us a 42.1% GPU frequency gain.

As for full-screen anti-aliasing, the overclocked RADEON 9800 Pro card didn’t have much to offer. The memory frequency gain was small compared to the GPU frequency increase and, moreover, this card is overall rather indifferent to memory overclocking.

Summing it up, I would say that ATI RADEON 9800 Pro is less “balanced” compared to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but this doesn’t prevent it from showing a higher performance boost when both, the graphics core and memory, are overclocked.

Extreme Overclocking Resume

Now, let’s have a final reckoning. First comes the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card in MSI’s implementation:

• GPU overclocking: from 450MHz to 625MHz, or +38.9%;
• Graphics memory overclocking: from 850MHz to 950MHz, or +11.8%;
• Relative performance gain at extreme overclocking:
• Quality mode: +23.1%;
• Quality + FSAA 4x: +21.7%;
• Quality + AF 8x: +20.9%;
• Quality + FSAA 4x + AF 8x: +27.1%.

The results of the ATI RADEON 9800 Pro based graphics card from PowerColor:

• GPU overclocking: from 380MHz to 540MHz, or +42.1%;
• Graphics memory overclocking: from 680MHz to 840MHz, or +23.5%;
• Relative performance gain at extreme overclocking:
• Quality mode: +27.1%;
• Quality + FSAA 4x: +24.0%;
• Quality + AF 8x: +31.7%;
• Quality + FSAA 4x + AF 8x: +26.4%.

Overall, the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO based card from PowerColor showed a higher performance gain as a result of overclocking than the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra based card from MSI. However, if we compare the results of the two cards, this advantage will seem rather small:

The MSI card outperforms the PowerColor one in the “Quality” mode and with FSAA enabled. The same is true for extreme overclocking, in spite of a higher performance gain shown by ATI RADEON 9800 Pro.

The RADEON 9800 PRO performs anisotropic filtering faster, although with lower quality. That’s why the PowerColor card is ahead of the MSI one in the modes with enabled anisotropic filtering. Extreme overclocking only makes the gap wider.