Probably like me you wondered why your mighty graphic card is not function as powerful as it's advertised to be, you are working inside Houdini and the GPU-z is giving you a reading of 200mhz out of your 1950 (WTH) well the short answer is it has to do with driver setting and how it sees your programs. Most of Nvidia cards has this adaptive thing that maximize the power of your card as needed but how the hell this card (especially the gaming ones) is going to know that Houdini and 3ds max are different than Google Chrome.
As shown in the picture above you need to dive down inside Nvidia control panel and in the manage 3d settings head to the program settings tab and add your desired programs if they arent already there, then go down and change the Power management mode from what ever there to Prefer maximum Performance. Do that for every program and at the end dont forget to hit apply. A restart is needed here, now when you open your program you should see an increased performance and that GPU-z is giving the targeted MHz.