ClockBlocker (profiled AMD power-management control)

Ah, from what you're describing right there with locking or disabling powerplay states in Wattman, just be aware that ClockBlocker probably will not do better than what you're seeing (unless you're explicitly encountering a bug in the driver power-management). More likely than not your observing "power-throttling" (something that ClockBlocker does not try to bypass), so to keep your card's clocks up at the P7 maximum (across all games) you may need to reduce voltage or do a soft powerplay edit (see hellm's post on this) and increase the maximum power limits. Suggest checking in GPU-Z to see what's happening first and monitoring GPU power-draw.

As always, increasing power-limits is overclocking ... so be sure that you really want to do this. It'd be better (thermals, card lifespan, etc) to reduce voltage if you can run stable at a lower voltage first.

EDIT: To be clear, it IS worth it to get clocks stable in terms of the best gameplay experience and best frametime consistency. Sometimes this may mean capping your clocks at less than the maximum if you're finding the constant clock-changes are causing visible stuttering. Some games are worse offenders than others of course, some have absolutely no troubles at all despite the clock-changes ... so this is a trial and error type of thing.


Far as ClockBlocker, give this bundle a try here. You may also want to attempt toggling the power-management option in Radeon Global Settings and disabling ULPS with either Afterburner or RadeonMod. ClockBlocker's Helper Module is 32bit, YAP's is 64bit. Both have similar implementations of their compute approach, though may of course have different results.

Roger that, did find a new bug in the process with speculating the cause though .

Which OS are you on right now? Also give that repackaged version and the suggestions above a try.



If not, I'll likely need to make a version with more debug verbosity to get some insight into what's happening.

 

I'm using Windows 10 Home 1803.

I've tried the repackaged version and also tried YAP, no change, still 2D clocks. I don't have a power management option in Radeon Global Settings, but I tried disabling ULPS with Afterburner and using both the original and repackaged ClockBlocker but no changes.

 

So I got clockblocker working on my vega 56 but then I decided to use DDU to uninstall nvidia drivers and then did a fresh install of AMD ones. Problem is, it's not working anymore and the dump log shows something like 'got abnormal device count, re-initializing'. Whats wrong?

 

Aha, so the drivers that work with it are the latest ones (19.3.2) not (19.3.1). Good to know.

 

Indeed that's good to know, I've tested alot of drivers due to another issue that I had on my Vega FE (thread stuck in device driver), yet I have not tested ClockBlocker / YAP on the various driver versions yet. Knowing that there's issues with specific drivers, I'll have to re-install the 19.3.1's and see if I can reproduce this or figure out why it stopped working.

Thanks!

 

Just to say I've now updated to Windows 10 1809 and also updated to the 19.3.2 driver - still not working.

If there is anything else I can do to help diagnose the problem please let me know

 

Doesn't work for me on Windows 10 x64, it still downclocks:
https://i.imgur.com/ho9IjVQ.png
https://i.imgur.com/5g2lSTq.png

MSI R9 280X, Adrenalin 2019 19.7.1.

I tried running ClockBlocker.exe and Loader_x64.exe as an Admin and just running.

Upd. Ok, managed to make it work by changing blocking method to combined:



PS Oof, another process running in the background, like other 200 launchers, updaters, crash handlers, activators, background services etc. wasn't enough

 

I upgraded to 5700xt recently. And it is broken. In low load it appears to lower clocks too much, not keeping up when more computing power is needed. I have like up to 2s freezes in games in certain situations. One solution is to set higher quality is game settings to prevent gpu clock from dropping, but this is not a good solution at all.

I wanted to try ClockBlocker which was helping with my r9 390 issue. Well, might as well link that. https://community.amd.com/message/2814232

Do you plan upgrading ClockBlocker for Navi? It doesn't work currently in either of the modes. I can help with debugging if you need someone with hardware.

Reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/d65xc0/its_become_apparent_that_the_5700xt_is_broken_at
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/dcz9k6/5700_xt_not_game_boosting_as_it_should_in_games

 

I'm in the same boat, and hopefully there's something than can be done to force boost clocks until AMD finally fix this mess

 

Navi's a tough one to control, minimum slider in Wattman doesn't properly apply though voltages might but can still drop below the set value since it adjusts for the clock speed which means drops lower than set will use lower than set values and similarly boosts above set will use higher than set values.

Power draw can be used to limit boost a bit but it also impacts the GPU's overall clock speed and might hold it back a bit even if it also reduces the spikes somewhat but that doesn't do much for the mins and for D3D9 the driver situation is pretty rough where it frequently goes into really low speeds and the same applies when using lower settings so games like Battlefield 5 which pops up frequently as a example could be hitting 40 - 100 FPS because the GPU because the GPU momentarily fell to 60% load or lower and instead of having some wait time the card immediately responds so it's no longer 1800 Mhz - 2000 Mhz it's 600 - 800 Mhz even for just a few seconds and stuttering and performance going down.

GPU's are going to have periods where they wait for data, Vega hit those pretty much all the time with gaps clearly visible when profiling it (Say via AMD's own tools for this.) even though Vega required some work to be working it's best well these cards should have some tolerance for at least a few frames before shifting or that's my idea but the non-working or what seems like it's not working min speeds is also a concern as are other issues.


Not sure if the tool here can do much unless a higher GPU load is simulated but that might impact performance a bit or other factors if that's what it takes to keep the GPU around boost speeds and the card is made around a system where it can fluctuate freely in reaction to overall GPU load and demands which goes from 3D and gaming or applications to media playback and such too.

AMD can likely improve it too, Ryzen 2 I think had a similar thing so newer drivers should be able to adjust the boost function so it's less sensitive or more accepting of certain Wattman changes.
Few tweaks and it's doing well when it's running as it should, it's these other issues when it's not doing that plus the bugs and other issues that need priority and fixing but it's taking some time.

 

I have the same problem with navi boosting. Its totally broken. There are numerous post here and on reddit and still amd is yet to acknowledge the issue. The workarounds improve the situation but they don't totally fix it.

 

I am so thankful for this program!! I've had a R7 360 for a while now and always gave me artifacts on in browser full screen playback while streaming. Only because the GPU would remain at idle. I'm sure it may be a alight problem with the GPU but not worth an RMA. As long as the clocks ramp up even just a little they go away. I looked for so long for an easy remedy with no luck. Found this in a matter of minutes. This is awesome watching my streaming with no artifacts!!!

 

Windows itself also has settings that does not let the OS clock down hardware. I haven't used it in a bit especially with newer hardware but in the past when I used to game it used to work great.

 

Is there another app that can block the memory frequency ? Or is there any other way to lock it ? I have a r9 390 and is only stable if I'm using clockblocker the downside is that clockblocker doesn't work with amd newest drivers and I need them to play games like cod warzone.