Is overclocking more successful with a lower resolution?
Posted: 04 Sep 2019, 12:12
I don't care if I have to lower my resolution to 800x600, I just want to experience that 200hz on my 144hz monitor 
It depends.
Sometimes it can succeed. But the success rate is not necessarily higher than native resolution.
You can try all methods, to figure out how a monitor overclocks:
- Simply raising Hz
- Reduced horizontal totals too (transfer bandwidth from HBI to increasing Hz)
- Reduced vertical totals too (transfer bandwidth from VBI to increasing Hz)
- Reduced bit depth (e.g. 6bpc) too (transfer bandwidth from color depth to increasing Hz)
- Reduced resolution too (transfer bandwidth from high resolution to increasing Hz)
- Enabling/disable of instant modes or low-lag modes
- Enabling/disable of HDR modes
- Enabling/disable of VRR modes
- ToastyX CRU versus NVIDIA Control Panel versus AMD Catalyst Control Center
- GPU scaling versus monitor scaling
- Disabling of features that interfere with overclocking
- Out-of-Range defeat hacks (dismiss that firmware popup message & force monitor to try to sync)
Sometimes you need to focus on a different pre-requisite, to figure out how to trick a display into overclocking successfully.
Most of the time, lowering resolution to overclock is not usually successful on modern high-bandwidth connections such as DisplayPort 2.0 and the overhead of a scaler can produce a weak link to overclocking. You do need to use ToastyX CRU instead of NVIDIA Custom Resolution sometimes, to force native resolution from the GPU, rather than GPU scaling.