Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 – The Nitty Gritty

GPU Boost is the next of Nvidia’s new tricks in the box. In a nutshell, this technology will ramp up the GPU core speed to boost the performance in game whilst keeping the cards power consumption under the 195W limit.

Typically as we know, a game will only perform to a certain level based on the cards set core and memory speeds. In a vast majority of games this means that the card will be utilising a lot less than its max power target. But what if we can utilise that extra power that is available.

As we can see here from the first bar, game X only requires the card to draw a set level of power during a particular frame and there is the opportunity to boost the cards performance bringing the power consumption upto the cards set target.

To do this the card will dynamically ramp up its clocks on a frame-per-frame basis so for example the card will boost its performance by 45% on one frame but the next frame requires more power before the boost and so the card will dynamically boost its performance by say 43% for that next frame keeping the overall power usage within the target limit. As said this is done on a frame-per-frame basis so the card is consistently raising and lowering its boosted clock speed to stay within the target power level.

Inverting the graph to show this in respect of the overall clock speed, we can see that the games that require less power to start with, will enable the card to run at a higher clock speed to give the user the best gaming experience available at that particular moment.