Getting the Most Out Of Your Hardware: Video Card Utility Roundup
by Ryan Smith on July 5, 2007 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ATI Tray Tools
Given some of the weaknesses with the Catalyst Control Center we previously mentioned, third-party tools have come in to fill the void. The most popular of these is ATI Tray Tools, a taskbar-only application that's best described as the opposite of the Catalyst Control Center. It's light (the installer fits on a floppy disk) and features practically every tweak option that an advanced user would need, including those much needed features that the Catalyst Control Center is lacking. In practice, its greatest weakness is that it's not meant for basic users; it's an advanced utility that comes with a somewhat steep learning curve.
The most notable feature of ATI Tray Tools is a full suite of overclocking controls and hardware monitoring tools. Overclocking support follows the fairly new trend of offering both hardware level and driver level overclocking. The former offers more specific control over voltages, cooling, and artifact testing; the latter offers the promise of greater stability by letting the overdrive feature of the Catalyst drivers do the hard work. Coupled with this are the previously mentioned hardware monitoring abilities, which allow monitoring of everything from card voltages and temperatures to memory usage to even some motherboard-level data.
The other highly notable feature is that it's the only major ATI utility (first-party or otherwise) that supports profiles. This includes a full control of all 3D settings, along with overclocking controls for each profile. Other features include a refresh rate lock for problematic games, global hotkeys, an interface to normally hidden registry tweaks, and an on-screen display for use in games.
Because of the small footprint and large feature set, ATI Tray Tools is often used as the de facto replacement for the Catalyst Control Center. Most of this popularity comes from the handful of highlighted features that it has that the Catalyst Control Center lacks. While it's not without its flaws, many as a result of its third-party status limiting access to documentation and compatibility testing, it's the closest to perfection out of any of the multi-feature utilities we're looking at today. It does however lack the Catalyst Control Center's more intuitive monitor controls, so ATI users will likely want to keep the Catalyst Control Center installed to handle those adjustments.
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Wwhat - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
Unfortunately MS forced people to get obscure updates you had to search for, that installed lots of DRM(-updates) for DXVA to work and have 'purevideo' enabled in many common utilities like WMP.And vista has its share of such pain too I understand due to it being thick with DRM, if anything is not 100% in line with MS's demands (or should I say sony/WB's?) it will simply not work right, often without much notification.
xsilver - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
i know ati tool works for both nvidia and ati but what about the rest?also
"and individual cards cost up to $900, what is another half-million spent on making a new utility to go with said GPUs?"
this comment was particularly funny - i doubt these 3rd party tools were made with anywhere near that $$$
gigahertz20 - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
*Takes out bat and hits xsilver in head**THONK!!!!*
Duh, he was talking about the companies you idiot. None of these 3rd party applications have a budget of anything!!!. They are completely free.
xsilver - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
yes exactly -you misunderstood what I wrote
what it takes 3rd party makers a few thousand dollars (ok maybe more)
it takes nvidia and ati half a million.
thats funny no?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
It's just a really simple estimate, don't think too hard on it. I'm figuring NV would need 3 full time people (2 programmers, 1 QA), and various fractions of management and engineering resources to get the job done. By the virtue of being a company, NV immediately encounters costs that a single guy working in his spare time doesn't have, but it also means that NV could build a better utility since they know the hardware inside and out(at the cost of making the whole thing slightly more expensive to develop).kmmatney - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
They probably need more resources than that, especially just to get drivers signed off by Microsoft...gigahertz20 - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Enjoyed this article, it's amazing to think these big companies cannot produce utilites for their very own video cards that can beat out 3rd-party applications. They create these complex million line code drivers, but yet that can't create an application that will let you overclock your video card and test it out like ATITool does? It would be nice to have one driver by each company (AMD and Nvidia) that let's you perform all tweaks 3rd party apps let you do and don't consume lots of hard drive space and memory....and it should have an easy to use intuitive iPhone like interface....The perfect AMD or Nvidia driver, small size, lots of features, consumes little system resources, intuitive interface = perfect
That's why uTorrent is one of the most popular torrent clients, the programmers for these large corportations need to get with it!