RivaTuner v2.11 released

Dear forum visitors,

RivaTuner v2.11 has been released, changes list includes:


Minor bugfixes:


- Low-level hardware access interfaces are now re-initialized properly before restarting the plugins when changing display adapter selection in the main tab.


What's new:


- Updated databases for Detonator and ForceWare drivers. Added database for ForceWare 177.98.
- Added experimental AMD RV710 and RV730 graphics processors families support. Thanks to Andrey Vorobiev for testing RivaTuner with AMD RADEON HD 4670.
- Display adapter enumeration routine has been modified to provide proper fan control on AMD RADEON HD 4870 X2 series. New enumeration routine also gives additional advantages to the rest systems:
- Now RivaTuner is able to detect physical display adapters attached to logical Windows display devices as well as unattached physical display adapters. Low-level access to unattached display adapters gives you the following abilities:
- Ability to use RivaTuner for low-level diagnostics, hardware monitoring and fan control even when Windows is booted in VGA mode (e.g. in safe mode or with no display driver installed).
- Ability to use RivaTuner for low-level diagnostics, hardware monitoring and fan control for slave display devices in SLI / Crossfire mode invisible for OS.
Attached display adapters detection time has been reduced due to optimized PCI bus scanning routine. Furthermore, both attached and unattached display devices detection are optional and can be forcibly disabled via DetectAttachedDevices and DetectUnattachedDevices registry entries for startup time optimization.
- Improved secondary display adapter heads enumeration. Now RivaTuner mirrors primary head specific settings (e.g. overclocking and fan control) into the secondaty head UI.
- Optimized startup time due to improved object dynamic/static casting in hardware abstraction layer.
- Added experimental overclocking support for the secondary display adapters in Crossfire systems (only for Windows Vista).
- Added experimental low-level fan control and overclocking settings cloning modes. When cloning mode is enabled RivaTuner clones and automatically applies the same low-level fan control or overclocking settings to all identical devices (i.e. the same display adapter models, different brands are allowed) installed in the system. Please take a note that currently these modes are available to power users only and can be enabled via EnableFanControlCloning and EnableClockControlCloning registry entries.
- Updated exceptions list for bundled D3DOverrider utility.
- Improved hardware monitoring module:
- Improved ADT7473.dll plugin:
- Added Vcc and Vccp voltages monitoring support. Now The the plugin can monitor state of +3.3V supply voltage of ADT7473 chip (Vcc) and additinal optional voltage input (Vccp), which can be used to monitor different display adapter related voltages depending on the PCB design (e.g. memory voltage on RADEON HD 4870 X2 series display adapters).
- Improved fan speed monitoring for fans with non-standard pulses per revolution count on tachometer output. Now the plugin no longer uses hardcoded calculations for standard fans with 2 pulses per revolution and can provide correct RPM monitoring for such systems (e.g. fans with 4 pulses per revolution on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 / 280 series).
- Improved VT1103.dll plugin:
- Now the plugin is able to monitor independent temperatures of VT1105/VT1165 voltage regulator phases (slave chips).
- Improved temperature monitoring for RV710 / RV730 / RV770 graphics processors family. Now RivaTuner is able to monitor independent temperatures of display controller, memory controller and shader core on RV7xx graphics processors. Please take a note that unlike many other diagnostic tools reading these temperatures via GPU's internal sensor switching and calibration logic, RivaTuner reads these temperatures via direct access to thermal sensor's ADC outputs and calibrates ADC readings at software level. Such approach drastically reduces CPU load and doesn't have side effects like fan speed fluctuations caused by frequent sensor switching, however it is in experimental stage yet so please contact me if additional core temperatures reported by RivaTuner and other software like GPU-Z or Everest seriously differ on your system. Please take a note that traditional sensor switching based access to these temperature sensors can be also enabled for debugging and performance comparision via ATIThermalSensorAccessModeR7xx registry entry.
- Optimized GPU usage monitoring for RV710 / RV730 / RV770 graphics processors family. Now RivaTuner is no longer waiting for response from on-die PowerPlay microcontroller if GPU usage is not sampled yet and returns the previous cached value instead.
- Now hardware monitoring plugin activation wizard module enables ADT7473 plugin by default on AMD READEON HD 4870 X2 series display adapters.
- Improved /SD and /SELECTDEVICE command line switches handler. RivaTuner's GUI is no longer activated and displayed when current display device selection is changed via these command line switches. This improvement allows you to switch target display device in multimonitor or multi-GPU SLI/Crossfire systems via hotkeys without leaving 3D application.
- Added I2C bus disconnection feature for ATI RV6xx/RV7xx I2C controllers. Now RivaTuner is able to mark I2C bus as unused and exclude it from further detection when I2C controller is not responding to the transactions through this bus during specified timeout. Bus disconnection feature drastically reduces I2C devices scanning time on some systems with missing I2C buses (e.g. on the secondary chip of AMD RADEON HD 4870 X2 having no physical connection to I2C bus). Please take a not that I2C bus disconnection can be disabled via AllowI2CBusDisconnection registry entry if necessary.
- Default timeout for ATI I2C transactions has been reduced from 2 seconds to 0.5 second. Now power users may adjust the timeout using ATII2CTimeout registry entry.
- Improved duty cycle generation accuracy for all types of on-die and external fan controllers due to floating point calculation usage.


Stay tuned!

 

Correct, totally forgot about adding 4x multiplier for DDR5 in case of enabling "Show effective memory clock". Will do it in v2.12, thanks for reminding.

 

Why? I see no sense in killing well promoted name.

 

It worked fine before too.

Because there is no 3D based clock frequency adjustment on new ATI GPUs, PowerPlay controller adjusts the clocks according to the current GPU usage and 2D graphics operations also need hardware acceleration which is treated as GPU usage by PowerPlay controller.

So? When you run different applications CPU usage is different too depending on the tasks they perform. Try to analyze the idea that dynamically updated and scrolled graphs are probably a bit more GPU-power consuming than text values and min-graphs displayed in GPU-Z.

Use search for "hardware monitoring", "stuttering" and "hardware polling". You cannot expect hardware polling operations to be absolutely free, and RT gives you many ways to estimate performance hit and configure it per your needs.

 

Almost. However the switching is done not by the driver but at hardware level by PowerPlay microcontroller, which dynamically tracks GPU usage (which in fact reflects GPU command buffer state). So that is software independent loop.

Right.

Answered above, it is hardware based. I'm not sure if there are configurable hardware thresholds, I've never seen them inside the registers so probably they are hardcoded.

Correct, X2 use 2D/3D based clock switching due to some reason.