About

A simple DirectX 12 based GPU clock stabilizer used for consistent GPU profiling on Windows. It can be used for profiling applications made with other modern graphics APIs as well. It utilizes DirectX 12's SetStablePowerState device method in order to achieve this. This allows more deterministic timestamp query results used for calculating elapsed GPU time for any given range of render calls at the expense of lower performance. You can read more about it here. Also, make sure that your GPU actually supports ID3D12Device::SetStablePowerState.

Installation

The DirectX 12 SDK comes included with the Windows 10 SDK which is part of the Visual Studio installation. Just make sure you install the Game Development with C++ in the Visual Studio Installer.

Run cmd cmake . -B bin -A x64 in the project's root.

How it works

If not specified in the command line, the first available GPU will be chosen. You can also specifiy the GPU explicitly by passing the name of the preferred GPU, for example "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070". Names of your GPUs can be found in Device Manager, Display Adapters tab. This way the application can work on multi GPU system. In order for GPU clock to remain stable, the application should remain running at all times. After exiting the application, or after one hour, clock stabilization will stop working. For testing the GPU clock I recommend using the TechPowerUp GPU-Z. Observe the Sensors/GPU Core Clock's behavior with and without the application running.

Results

First image shows the usual GPU clock values on NVidia GeForce RTX 3070 and the second one shows the clock with the gpu_clock_stabilizer running. This was captured using the TechPowerUp GPU-Z.

Troubleshooting

If SetStablePowerState is failing, please refer to the SetStablePowerState Microsoft Documentation for troubleshooting. This mostly happens if Developer Mode is not enabled on Windows.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.