Tools for use with RT

[MrWoo]

First and foremost, thank you Unwinder. v206 was a great tool, but v207 is so much easier to work with via the scheduler. I had custom regs for it within a half hour, and those have been deployed to a few friends computers and work very well.

I thought maybe there should be a thread to list all the different tools and utilities that peeps use when messing with RT, so I am startin it.

I have a couple tools myself. First is the calculator for figuring your Temp thresholds. It is at
SG-Tvid-v1

Next I have a tool that will expose all of the information from Unwinders registry database. It shows the key name, description and possible values. It is at SG-RT-Help-v1

I also like to use GPU-Z when doing stuff with RT as it shows some good stuff on your video card.

And let us not forget DriverSweeper, from guru3d, a very useful app for swapping nvidia drivers.

For those who wish to know, it is possible to install v207, set up your fan/oc profiles, set up your launchers, scheduler items, etc, and then manipulate the resulting registry keys so that you have a .reg file you can merge after a reinstall. Works quite well.

MrWoo

EDIT: ** There are many repeat questions regarding fan speed control, as well as the apparent lack of reading the release notes on new versions to see what MIGHT have changed. So here is a thread that maybe can help with that **

SEARCH KEYWORDS:
Fan Speed Control Threshold Launcher Scheduler v206 v207 v208 help fan profile broken not working problem low level driver fan profile

FOR THE PEEPS:

v206
This version allowed you to use low level module to change fan speed to manual. Here you could set the gpu fan at X% speed. You then had the option to save that speed % as a 'Fan Profile'.

Once that was done, you could make a 'Launcher' for that item. In other words, a shortcut, whether it be used by Riva itself or you assign a hotkey to it, nothing more than a shortcut.

So once you have a fan % profile and a shortcut to it, you could then use the "Hardware Monitoring" module to monitor your gpu temps. Within the core temperature graph (for gpu core), you had the option to set a 'Threshold', or a certain mark in the graph with which to do something. Most used this to set a certain temperature at which to 'launch' thier launcher for a certain fan profile. In other words, you could tell the fan to run at X% when a certain temperature was reached.

Other uses for thresholds were most often for dynamic overclocing. The premise here was that in the driver settings tab one could make an over/underclocking profile in much the same way as a fan speed profile. A launcher was made, and then one used the Core clock/ROP graph to trigger a threshold, which in turn would do some over/under clocking.

Nvidia drivers at the time were raising and lowering the coreclock depending on whether or not there was a 3D application running. Since the core clock was rising and falling on it's own, it became a good way to trigger the memory to rise and fall with it. Thus, underclocking could be achieved easily to help keep heat and power consumption down. Likewise, when a 3D app was started, and the card automatically went into normal core clock speeds, you could use that as a trigger to raise the speeds and overclock.

This was a very very handy method to use.

BUT, THAT WAS BROKEN.

If you are wondering why the tutorial you have read does not seem to work on this over/under clock method, you are not alone. I see many ask this question. The answer is that nvidia (AFAIK) broke the feature in thier drivers that linked the core and memory clocks. Basically, the core clock no longer went down on it's own, so we lost the ability to use the core clock graph as a trigger.

The solution was to use the plugin (graph) Hardware Acceleration. Not OpenGL HA, not D3D HA, just simple Hardware Acceleration. It is a true or false value, 1 or 0, on or off. So you could set your 'threshold' to .50 and it would be crossed when HA was on, thus an OC could be set, or it was crossed again when HA was off, so a UC could be set (underclock). The trick to this however is that the Hardware Acceleration graph is unable to actually give information as to whether or not HA is taking place. The only way to do that is to use the RT Statistics Server. If the RTSS is running, then the HA graph could return data that the thresholds could be triggered with.

NOW v207 AND v208 ARE OUT, AND THRESHOLDS ARE NO LONGER IN THE PROGRAM...

In v207/208, Unwinder wisely removed the thresholds from the graphs, as they were replaced by what is called the 'Scheduler'. The scheduler is, basically, the 'Thresholds', but in one organized tab and much easier to manipulate and manage.

For those of you seeking the 'Thresholds', just open the main RT GUI, and look at the scheduler tab.

Here you simply want to select the launcher item (among other things), and then pick a schedule. Most often it will be a threshold event. It could also be a range event, or one of the others. Either way, once you pick these two items, you will be asked to decide on the data source (hint: graph name) and in the case of a threshold, whether it is an upward crossing or a downward crossing event. You can change the color band displayed in the graph, or choose to not display it in the graph at all. The band also now shows whether the event is on the downward or upward swing.

The OC/UC still works with the scheduler too. You can still use the same methods as before, for older drivers using the event based on the automatically rising/falling of the core clock, or if using RTSS, you can use the Hardware Accleration to trigger your OC/UC events.

Hopefully many will find this thread when (and if) they search, and will have what I have seen as a very common question answered.

I will say though that even before I was able to download RT v207, I knew the thresholds were gone and that the scheduler was to be used. If maybe a little bit of time was taken to read up on a new release of such a program, many of these questions could have been answered.

Good luck.

MrWoo

[Unwinder]

Well done!

[MrWoo]

*bump*