Wondering if anyone has answers as to why (Gigabyte Waterforce GTX 1080)

So there was something I notice about this card last night, so I decided to download FurMark for shits and giggles.

Now something weird I noticed between no msaa and 8 x msaa

With 8x msaa on the core clock would jump up to 2030~ mhz and TDP would spike at about 80%, and I am like cool, pic for reference



Now something weird, i would turn MSAA to off....you would think it would require less power because of less gpu intensity right? Well think again (i know the benchmark is suppose to push it regardless but you know what i mean) but then the card would jump up to 100+ tdp ( I do have TDP set about ten percent from norm) with a LOWER clock, pic for reference.
It would also consume more power from PSU



I believe this is kind of strange.......I have done some web searches but have not found anything, figured I would come to this site, been coming here off and on for about 15 years now, forgot my old account password and such, great site and forum.

I had been out of the PC scene for about the same amount of time, pretty much learning everything all over again lol.
Thanks in advance and thought I would share because it has peaked my interest a little. Ask me anything if you need more info.

Oh, and to also show here are my settings with the software from Gigabyte, core clock has NOT been touched, the only thing that has been changed in the other tabs is the fan profile, i made it slightly more aggressive and thats about it, and my TDP is set to 125% not 110%. I said that wrong in my original post. Also, without changing anything in the software it jumps up to 2030~ mhz on its own straight out of the box.

I imagine AA is more like a post process effect, limited by the architecture's IPC for one or two integer or floating point operations applied over the entire frame buffer; simple and repetitive. Where as a full frame render is a more complex set of vector operations and close to utilizing everything that the die package has to offer. Now if you had vsync or something limiting you to 60 frames per second, turning off AA would decrease the power usage for the same number of frames. However, without a frame limit, turning off Anti-Aliasing removes some instruction bottleneck in the gpu and allows it to push out frames at it's full potential. Basically, part of the graphics card is sitting idle until it finishes post processing.

hmmmm, okay, that would make sense, thanks for the reply. But if the architecture is limited for processing AA why wouldn't the GPU down clock? I just think its weird that it is maxing its clock for another part that cant keep up with it and using 20 percent less power. I would understand if it downclocked and used less power, but not the other way around. (core voltage goes up as well when it maxes out)

Additionally, I believe they have put things into the drivers that detect FurMark and reduce the performance on purpose to avoid blowing out some components.

Virtual_Bomber said:

hmmmm, okay, that would make sense, thanks for the reply. But if the architecture is limited for processing AA why wouldn't the GPU down clock? I just think its weird that it is maxing its clock for another part that cant keep up with it and using 20 percent less power. I would understand if it downclocked and used less power, but not the other way around. (core voltage goes up as well when it maxes out)

Click to expand...

Because if it lowered the clock speed, whatever process it's spending all that time waiting on would take even longer, and the Pascal architecture has this elaborate logic it uses to control the clock speed that takes power, temperature and allowable voltage into account.

Thanks for the responses, i haven't actually monitored this in other programs/games so it probably is something vague nvidia or furmark did.