Is Vcore locking needed for Gainward RTX 5080 in Cyberpunk?
While speeding through Night City, my frames would suddenly dive from 140 down to 50. It was a total performance cliff. I found that when Path Tracing was on, the auto-voltage on the Gainward RTX 5080 Storm was jumping between 0.9V and 1.1V, causing the core clock to tank. I tried the 'Extreme Performance' mode in Windows, but that actually made the voltage swings worse—I was being way too naive with that approach. I finally used a tuning tool to lock the Vcore at 1.05V and manually smoothed out the frequency-voltage curve. In the monitor, the GPU clock finally flattened out between 2600-2800MHz without those jagged drops. At first, the core temp hit 88℃, so I had to set the fans to a constant 80% load to keep it under control. VRM temps are now 72-78℃, and the game feels fluid. I switched the performance profile to 'Extreme' in the control panel, and the GPU is now stable at 67-73℃.
