We’ll look at how the performance-tuning profiles in AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition affect the behavior of Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC. We’ll show a simple way to overclock the GPU both manually and automatically using the basic presets, how to undervolt it, and how to adjust the power limits for overclocking. We’ll also measure how performance changes when we reduce the card’s power draw by 100 W, and we’ll try VRAM tuning.
We’ve gone through the basic settings available in AMD Software under the Performance tab in Tuning, and tested how specific profiles and options affect the card’s power consumption, GPU clocks, and memory clocks.
AMD’s preset profiles are conservative, and if you want better results, you’ll need to dive into manual overclocking. Most custom settings influence multiple values at once, and some aren’t all that intuitive—for example, lowering GPU voltage doesn’t cut its power draw, but actually overclocks it.
That’s why I focused on each of these settings individually. Even with just these, you can do a lot—by lowering the power limit, you can achieve significant power savings and undervolt the card with only a small performance impact. Conversely, raising the power limit allows overclocking. Reducing voltage again overclocks the card without increasing its power draw, and the same applies to memory overclocking.
Next time, we’ll take a closer look at how all the settings work together, what can be achieved by combining them, and go into more detail on fan control and card noise.
