Getting the Most Out Of Your Hardware: Video Card Utility Roundup

Final Words

While both ATI and NVIDIA generally do good work with their bundled first-party utilities, ultimately it doesn't take much effort on our part to pick out areas where they fall short. These utilities are well suited for basic users but are lacking in features for advanced users who find these same utilities bundled with their enthusiast-class card(s). With a market explicitly focused on selling these high-end cards to the same people that are going to want to tweak them in ways well beyond the normal user, both parties could offer better software. Much of what's missing is already in the drivers in the first place, so it largely comes down to an issue of creating a (good) UI to access it.

Until that changes, we have seen several third-party tools that offer these missing features and controls, and often in a much smaller footprint than the first-party tools they augment or replace. It goes without saying that ATI, NVIDIA, and their customers are all getting a great deal out of these utilities as they're all free and more than likely have sold at least a few cards to customers that have purchased them based on what these third-party utilities could do. In lieu of truly spectacular utilities coming from the creators themselves, it's a bit strange to see the true jewels of the software needed to control such powerful hardware coming from a third party.

With that said, we'll give ATI and NVIDIA some breathing room and some advice. Their software in spite of its shortcomings isn't terrible; the NVIDIA utility set in particular is downright decent. But at the same time when R&D costs for the latest generation of GPUs is estimated at over a hundred-million dollars and individual cards cost up to $900, what is another half-million spent on making a new/better utility to go with said GPUs?

Both parties only need to look as far as their fan base to see what enthusiasts are really after in their utility software. To that end, the biggest factor of course is size, which influences download times, loading times, and memory usage while active. Our favorite utility (ATI Tray Tools) packs in nearly every feature we could ask for while it fits on a floppy disk and could very well be a few times bigger without anyone batting an eye. While accomplishing this with the current first-party tools is going to be out of the question, this doesn't mean that ATI and NVIDIA can't create a second utility that users can drop in to replace the default utilities included in each company's respective driver set.

For features, much of what both companies would be advised to offer is already in their drivers and simply left unexposed in their current utility sets. This includes better control over SLI/Crossfire features and more reasonable (at least in the case of ATI) overclocking limits. This also includes external features such as application profiles, better hardware monitoring, and more aggressive stability testers & artifact scanners.

In the end, better hardware deserves better software than what is passing as acceptable today. We believe that users shouldn't be at the mercy of third-parties for getting the most out of their systems, and this is not something they can do today with first-party utilities.