Heat is an inevitable byproduct of work. It’s generated when you start a car’s engine, go for a brisk walk or anything else that generates friction. Heat is also prevalent in electronics where it can be more difficult to manage and can be detrimental to their continued operation. When it comes to graphics cards there are many ways to manage heat, from passive cooling, to fans and even water. But when these solutions aren’t working, your GPU has one more way to beat the heat: thermal throttling.

When your GPU takes on a heavy workload, such as gaming, it generates a load of heat. When your cooling solution can no longer dissipate heat fast enough to keep temperatures within a safe range, your graphics card starts to dump performance to shed heat. The core and memory frequencies begin to drop—along with your framerates—until temperatures drop to a safe operating range. All modern GPUs have this feature in place to protect the electronic components from damage. Unmanaged, thermal throttling can have a big impact on performance. And, while thermal throttling itself doesn’t cause any damage, the underlying cause of throttling, heat, can cause damage and shorten the lifespan of your video card.