I "tried" Crysis 3 just now...
According to MSI Afterburner;
GPU temp at this time was 105c and GPU usage at 100%. Fan speed at 100% CPU temp was avg 84c.
Yup, crisis 3 doesn't play that badly, but if you look under those graphs from MSI, you can see the core clock is throttling pretty heavily. I've never seen a core do that before. It's almost always completely the same MHz speed all across, just like the memory clock is.
Right now, the most important thing is trying to find someway to measure core clock fluctuations in OS X. For the life of me, I can't seem to find any piece of software that will allow us to measure even in a log file Temperature, GPU Usage, and Core Clock over time.
If the core is throttling itself in OS X, just like in windows, the issue is not so much that this is ruining gameplay or interrupting it to a point where things are unplayable, performances is just nowhere near what it should be because heat appears to be a huge issue in this form factor. There is no question that on paper the 295X is an amazing card, but it should be blowing the 680 MX out of the water in every test and it is not. Over time, as various issues contribute to reduced cooling efficiency, if this means that the GPU throttles itself even more, even faster, just to stay cool than this is bad news for me.
Theoretically any pro app as well that taps out the GPU at a maximum temperature is going to automatically throttle itself 50-100 MHz lower too, which means the performance that you're getting out of the GPU is not what it should be if your workflow is GPU limited. It won't interrupt the process or give an error, all it's going to do is just take longer. Like I said, the most important thing now is seeing if this throttling behavior is in OS X as well.
Trust me, I have been praying like you wouldn't believe that this may be a bug on the window side. You do not know how much I want this card to be good!!! So no one cancel your orders just yet, we will get to the bottom of this.
