As soon as the clock speeds reach a certain level, the game crashes to desktop.
Sounds like a typical unstable overclock to me.
Third-party cards are notorious for this. They try to outdo each other by a few MHz, since many buyers only look for the highest boost clock, and end up with a card which is unstable - if not all of the time, at least in certain games.
People would often blame the game for those stability issues though.
The Evil Within has a reputation for being prone to crashing, while it's almost entirely due to bad overclocks.
After reducing the clockspeed by 50–100 MHz on both a GTX 960 and GTX 970, the game never crashed for me a single time. Before then it was crashing within 15 minutes of loading the game.
A similar thing happened with my GTX 570 in
Deus Ex: Human Revolution when tesselation was enabled. In that case, increasing the voltage fixed it.
Since it was one of the early games which used that feature, it would have been easy to blame the game - it was the only one crashing after all.
But it happened because the GPU had shipped with an overclock on the edge of instability that was fine in most games, until tesselation was being used.
DXHR does still have a reputation for crashing though - even when it's not always the game's fault.
And since these GPUs are power-hungry, with a lot of people using power supplies that are just barely meeting spec or technically under it, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor as well.
I've spent all day trying to understand why games like Death Stranding are underperforming like crazy to me compared to reviews no matter the settings and with no bottleneck in the system. Got a FE.
How are you determining that there is "no bottleneck" in your system?
You need to be monitoring GPU usage. If it's spending most of its time below ~95% you're bottlenecked somewhere—likely by the CPU.
videocardz.com
