Question about overclocking GPU

[nes annie]

Normally i read about overclocking the cpu in consoles but what happens if you overlock the gpu or ram but not the cpu ?

[Tiido Priimägi]

you'd get massive video timing issues if you overclock the GPU...

[nes annie]

Even if you overclock a 20mhz gpu to 21mhz? Would something as small as this be detrimental & what about ram?

[l_oliveira]

The problem with console games and the console hardware itself is that with the fact that only one configuration exists, the programmers assume that no timing adjustments need to be done (the software won't adjust to a faster processor or graphics chip) causing timing glitches and other problems.

Now if you think of computer software, these are usually compiled with generic compilers, developers take different driver environments and different processor types/speeds in consideration and even the drivers itself contain code to provide some adjustments.

On console games very often hardware drivers are part of the game code. Only recently (PS2/PS3, XBOX/XBOX360) this started to change a bit to accommodate the possibility of an easier reverse compatibility.