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
ATITool
Not to be confused with ATI Tray Tools, and not to be confused as an ATI-only product, we have ATITool. Rather than trying to be a multi-feature utility, ATITool is solely designed as an overclocking utility that started out supporting ATI cards and has since expanded to support NVIDIA cards nearly as well. Generally it competes with ATI Tray Tools on the ATI side, and RivaTuner on the NVIDIA side, both of which support similar overclocking abilities.
As a more limited utility than any of the multi-feature tools we've looked at, ATITool only has to do a few things well and not surprisingly it does so. Like other hardware-level overclocking tools, it is able to completely manipulate clock speeds without driver interference or protection. It also offers fan speed controls, voltage controls, and overclocking profiles which can be applied via detection or hotkeys.
However, it's most notable feature - which has since been implemented in other utilities - is a highly aggressive artifact scanner for testing overclocked video cards. By generating a 3D image in order to bring the card to load while providing a reference image, ATITool can identify overclocking errors that aren't severe enough to crash a system but can cause graphical corruption. ATITool also offers an auto-overclocking feature using this scanner to try to find the highest possible overclock for a card by incrementing and decrementing clocks until the system crashes or artifacts are found. Even though other tools have similar features now, it's still the most aggressive testing utility of its kind that we've seen.
As the first tool we're discussing that supports overclocking NVIDIA cards, it's worth noting the limitations of such overclocking at this point. As we've discussed in our G80 architecture articles, the 8000-series cards clock the shader units separately from the rest of the core, with the shaders running roughly twice as fast. While the shaders can be clocked independently from the main core clocks, it's not possible to do this from software. Utilities such as ATITool can only adjust the core clock which in turn influences the shader clock, but not the shader clock itself. Until this is changed, the most precise overclocking on the 8000 series will require BIOS modifications, which we'll get into later.
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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!