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Graphics Cards

hyperreal
Journeyman III

High VRAM clock during video playback (RX 6800)

Hi,

My RX 6800 has very high VRAM clock during video playback, in browser with YouTube, Twitch etc. but also when using VLC Player. Right after I start playing a video, the clock jumps to 1990 MHz (with around 33W of power being drawn) and usually stays there until the playback stops. I built this PC in mid-January and this behavior has been present from the beginning.

I have a silence-optimized build and my PC is nearly inaudible during idle and low load desktop use. Because of this, I find it distracting to have the GPU fans going on and off during video playback, as the high VRAM clock makes the temps creep high enough for the fans to kick in.

The issue is most apparent with 1080p 60fps videos on YouTube but it also sometimes happens with lower video resolutions and lower FPS. Also, if watching a longer video, the VRAM sometimes "calms down" a bit, with the baseline dropping lower and only occasionally spikes to the 1990 MHz region. But this does not always happen and I haven't found any exact way to reproduce this behavior.

When left completely idle, the GPU temps hover around 37-39 C and there are no high VRAM clock spikes, so I'm pretty sure my issues is not caused by a shady background process or anything like that.

I've found threads on the subject of high idle clocks but less on video playback specifically. Are there any known fixes? For VLC Player I simply disabled hardware acceleration and it usually then keeps the GPU temps under the fan threshold. But I can't do that in my browser (Firefox) because it introduces some weird microstutter to scrolling and it strains my eyes.

My monitor is an Asus VE247H (1080p @ 60 Hz) from 2015. I'm upgrading to a 1440p 144 Hz monitor soon.

The GPU is an MSI Radeon RX 6800 Gaming X Trio and I'm using driver version 22.1.1

And just to be clear, the temps are not an issue. The fan noise is. Noise is acceptable during high load tasks such as gaming, of course, but if I'm just sitting around watching YouTube or a movie for example, I'd like my system as quiet as possible.

1 Reply

I just found this after searching and I have the same problem.

Funny thing is, it doesn't HAVE to run at high clocks. When I tab in and out of a game, while playing a video, more often than not the clock will go down again and the video keeps playing just fine. It's really odd.

I'm thinking it's probably connected to the Chromium browser issues we've been seeing for quite some time now, because it doesn't seem to happen if I use D3D9 as my renderer in Edge. (Chrome shows the same issues... All Chromium based browsers seem to)

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