If your motherboard supports PCI-E 2.0 and your GPU supports PCI-E 3.0 for example, then your system can only run at PCI-E 2.0 as a maximum. You can't alter the PCI-E version of your GPU or motherboard. You can stop the Render Test at any time just by clicking the X at the top right of it. This should bring the GPU completely out of power saving mode and display the correct link speed and width. To correctly test your maximum PCI-E bandwidth, click the '?' next to the Bus Interface field in GPU-Z, then click the 'Start Render Test' button. The numbers after the symbol show your current connection speed, which may be lower than your maximum due to the GPU typically being in power-saving mode on the Desktop. The higher the PCI-E revision, and the greater the number of lanes displayed for the link width, the more information your GPU can transfer to your system and vice-versa at any one time, which can improve performance. PCI-E 1.1, PCI-E 2.0, PCI-E 3.0 or PCI-E 4.0), and secondly, the maximum Link Width of the connection (i.e. The information shown in this GPU-Z field displays firstly the revision of the PCI-E interface your motherboard supports (i.e. For all modern GPUs this is a PCI Express bus, or PCI-E for short. PCI-E Speed: The main Bus type (communication pathway) which connects your GPU to the motherboard and the rest of your system is shown in this box under the main Graphics Card tab. Sensors: Under the Sensors tab in GPU-Z you will find the hardware monitoring features, the use of which is covered in detail in the Advanced Tweaking section later in the guide. Other useful features of GPU-Z worth noting here include:
To view a full historical list of all Nvidia GPUs and their specifications see this Wikipedia Article, or refer to the GPU-Z GPU Database. You can also refer to general GPU comparison charts such as the ones found here and here. In particular I recommend the GPU reviews at AnandTech as being useful, accurate and unbiased. "GTX 970 review"), and read various hardware reviews of your card both to see how it performs in a range of games at various resolutions, and to also find out more about its strengths and weaknesses. To get a rough idea of where your particular graphics card stands in terms of gaming performance, do a web search on your GPU's name combined with the word review (e.g. With this option ticked, whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a field, a small popup box appears with a description of that field. To understand what each of the fields in the GPU-Z interface shows, first click on the small GPU icon shown at the top left corner of the GPU-Z window and select Settings, or click the hamburger button at the top right of the main screen, then make sure the 'Enable Help Tooltips' box is ticked. Download the latest version of GPU-Z, launch it and you should see an information panel that looks like this: Fortunately there's a simple free graphics card information utility called GPU-Z that allows you to do this.
Update: This page and the next have been updated as of October 2019.īefore you can install any drivers for it, or perform any customization of its settings, you must get to know your graphics card's key specifications and capabilities.
Following the advice in this section will help to ensure that you have smooth, trouble-free performance from your GPU, minimizing driver issues as well as reducing wasted drive space. Then we examine in detail the ways in which you can completely uninstall all traces of current and previous graphics drivers from your system in preparation for what is known as a "Clean Installation".
In this section we first look at how to familiarize yourself with your Nvidia graphics card, also known as a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and its capabilities. Nvidia GeForce Tweak Guide Clean Installation Methods