MSI AB / RTSS development news thread

Discussion in 'MSI AfterBurner Application Development Forum' started by Unwinder, Feb 20, 2017.

  1. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    I'm not sure if there are too many original RivaTuner users left here (probably just me and Marc (aka boogieman)) who remember the very first versions of RTSS launched 12 years ago, back in 2005. Initially it had no OSD features and served entirely for collecting framerate statistics from all running 3D applications and providing it to RT (that's exactly why it was initially called Statistics Server). Since that time RTSS still have fully functional FPS benchmarking engine, which is able to collect not only current but also min, average and maximum FPS stats for any running application and store FPS benchmark results into a file. It was possible to assign hotkeys for benchmark recording begin/end in original RT, but MSI never needed such functionality so it was under that hood and never used in AB GUI. Now I'm thinking about removing the dust from this engine and adding a "Benchmark" tab to MSI AB for using this RTSS functionality. Anyone would like to see this feature resurrected?
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2017
  2. Andy_K

    Andy_K Master Guru

    Messages:
    842
    Likes Received:
    240
    GPU:
    RTX 3060
    I wasn't here on the forum those days, but I used Rivatuner (incl. RTSS) with my ATI 9500 Pro (patched to 9700 :nerd:) and later with a GF 6800GT.

    Yes, please. :toke:
     
  3. pstlouis

    pstlouis Master Guru

    Messages:
    404
    Likes Received:
    3
    GPU:
    RTX 2080Ti Aorus Xt
    Originally Posted by Unwinder View Post
    Anyone would like to see this feature resurrected?

    yes, will be appreciated.
     
  4. boogieman

    boogieman Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    1,984
    Likes Received:
    49
    GPU:
    MSI GTX 1080X
    Jeeze, 12 years already. Guess what, I still have RivaTuner v2.24c installed. :grin:
    Not sure why but I open it once in awhile to bring back fond memories. :)
     

  5. gedo

    gedo Master Guru

    Messages:
    310
    Likes Received:
    43
    GPU:
    RX 6700 XT 12GB
    I agree that all colours of the rainbow in the OSD don't add anything - they only make it more difficult to read.

    One place where a different colour *would* be nice would be as a warning/attention sign. Like have the OSD text render in green by default, but have certain values turn different colour if a user-set threshold is exceeded for temperature, or if the FPS doesn't meet certain minimum performance level. (E.g. Green = over 60, Yellow = 50 - 59, Red = Under 50, configurable by the user).

    I think the most important thing is to keep it simple and single-coloured for the most part and only use other colours as accents and attention-grabbers for abnormal things.

    Just my opinion. :)
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2017
  6. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    12 since RTSS announce, 17 since RT launch here, 20 since RT development start. hehe ;)
    I also still have unreleased 2.25 alpha 10 installed here.
     
  7. burebista

    burebista Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    1,740
    Likes Received:
    36
    GPU:
    MSI GTX1060GAMING X
    Add me too even I don't post too much. :)
    Back in time I even made a guide for it.

    I'm not a benchmark guy but if people wants why not?

    Anyway keep up the good work Alex. :thumbup:
     
  8. Octopuss

    Octopuss Guest

    Messages:
    867
    Likes Received:
    73
    GPU:
    -
    Holy crap, how old were you when you started on all this?
     
  9. jiminycricket

    jiminycricket Master Guru

    Messages:
    203
    Likes Received:
    4
    GPU:
    GTX 1080
    Yes absolutely. I'm still using ancient FRAPS for that.
     
  10. dr_rus

    dr_rus Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    3,886
    Likes Received:
    1,015
    GPU:
    RTX 4090
    Something strange is happening with text input into the "Framerate limit" field in the latest beta. When I click on it to enter the text RTSS window sometimes goes under the window which is below it for some reason. Looks like if you click on a transparent part of the input area you're actually clicking on the underlying window which is shown there instead of the text area.

    Transparency here also doesn't look too good:

    [​IMG]
     

  11. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    Reproduced, alpha channel is wrongly defined in this skin for "layered with alpha" skin composition mode. Until I patch the skin switch it to "layered with colorkey" to address that.
     
  12. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    That's old good RT's task scheduler "as is". I used it in conjunction with critical threshold crossing tracking mechanism in EVGA Precision 4 to play alarm sound when temperature is out of range so it is still inside can be easily attached to GUI and OSD layers as well. So it is really fast to add an ability to define custom color tag for values beyond the threshold.
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2017
  13. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    20. It was 1997 and I needed something to overclock and tune my Riva 128.
     
  14. dr_rus

    dr_rus Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    3,886
    Likes Received:
    1,015
    GPU:
    RTX 4090
    There's an issue with "layered with colorkey" too =) When you click the field to input text but just hit Enter without inputting anything, just when the cursor is blinking in the empty field - you get a solid black field without anything shown in it - and you can't click it anymore to enter anything, or at least you don't see what's happening there anymore.

    [​IMG]

    Have to either restart RTSS or use the arrows to the right to restore the field.
     
  15. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    That's a different story, which doesn't depend on skin/transparency, but it also definitively needs to be fixed. Entering empty string should be restricted for all edits.
     

  16. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    MSI AB 4.4.0 Beta 2 is uploaded. It contains RTSS 7.0.0 beta 5, which should fix 2 GUI glitches reported by Danil (dr-rus). Benchmark tab using internal RTSS functionality is now available to everyone. Changes requested by gedo (using modern OSD color tags for indicating critical temperature/fan speed limits) are also inside this build.
    The purpose of publishing MSI AB beta is entirely focused on testing RTSS related changes, however I stared updating documentation/context help as well so all changes are in readme now:


    • Added core voltage control for reference design NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti series graphics cards
    • Improved voltage/frequency curve editor for GPU Boost 3.0 capable NVIDIA graphics cards:
    o Toggling locked curve point state with <L> key is working properly now and no longer resulting in setting a lock to a minimum clock/frequency point
    o Now you may hold <Alt> key while adjusting the offset of any point with mouse to move the curve up/down. That’s equal to adding fixed offset to each point’s offset
    • Various parts of hardware monitoring module have been pumped up to improve hardware monitoring usability and flexibility. Some new portions of old good functionality from original RivaTuner are now available in MSI Afterburner:
    o Added experimental clock monitoring for Intel CPUs
    o Added asynchronous hardware polling mode. Asynchronous mode is aimed to move whole hardware polling to a separate thread to avoid slowing down MSI Afterburner GUI while polling some performance expensive hardware monitoring sources. Please take a note that the previous synchronous hardware polling mode can be also enabled via configuration file if necessary
    o Added new “Benchmark” tab allowing you to use hidden RivaTuner Statistics Server’s benchmarking engine, which was previously available to reviewers only. The engine is providing you the following features:
    - You may define a hotkey for beginning framerate statistics recording. Once the recording begun, it stays active for all subsequently started 3D applications, even after rebooting the system
    - While recording is active you may enable showing own statistics in RivaTuner Statistics Server to see minimum, average and maximum framerate in the On-Screen Display
    - While recording is active you may press “Begin recording” hotkey one more time to restart the recording and reset the statistics
    - While recording is active you may press “End recording” hotkey once to end recording and save benchmark results to a text file, but keep the results shown in On-Screen Display. You may press the hotkey one more time to hide the results from the On-Screen Display
    - Statistics saved to a benchmark results file includes per-application total benchmarking time, total rendered frames number, global average, instantaneous minimum and instantaneous maximum framerates. Benchmark statistics file can be optionally either overwritten or appended on each recording session
    - Per-frame frametime statistics is being pushed to a named pipe so reviewers can use their own client software to collect and display it in realtime while any benchmark is running without system slowdown, which is typical for traditional per-frame frametime logging approach
    o New flexible On-Screen Display customization features powered by RivaTuner Statistics Server’s text formatting tags:
    - Added On-Screen Display layouts support. Layout selection settings are located in “Monitoring” tab next to “Show in On-Screen Display”, you may select different layouts to change On-Screen Display appearance style. Now you may switch between traditional classic On-Screen Display layout or new modern column-oriented On-Screen Display layout. Power users may customize predefined layouts or create new ones via configuration file if necessary
    - The maximum text length for “Override group name” setting is no longer limited by 8 symbols. Now you may embed new RivaTuner Statistics Server’s text formatting tags directly into your custom group name, e.g. “<C=FFFFFF>GTX 1080<S=-50>1<S><C>” to display it in On-Screen Display in white color and with 50% size subscript index
    - Now it is allowed to override group names for “Framerate” and “Frametime” graphs, so you may append default application 3D API <APP> tag with some custom text or replace it completely if necessary
    - Exactly the same flexible level of On-Screen Display customization output is available to any other RivaTuner Statistics Server client applications like AIDA, HwInfo and others and will be available shortly
    o Now you may define optional minimum and (or) maximum thresholds for any graph in hardware monitor module to display alarm message in hardware monitor window when some monitored value is beyond the threshold. When modern On-Screen Display layout is selected, such values can also be highlighted by color there
    • Improved system information window. Now 3D API usage info, x64 and UWP application architecture attributes are displayed for each currently running process in the list of active 3D applications
    • RivaTuner Statistics Server has been upgraded to v7.0.0


    http://office.guru3d.com/afterburner/MSIAfterburnerSetup440Beta2.rar
     
    fluidz likes this.
  17. kx11

    kx11 Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,831
    Likes Received:
    2,639
    GPU:
    RTX 4090
  18. DaRkL3AD3R

    DaRkL3AD3R Active Member

    Messages:
    78
    Likes Received:
    13
    GPU:
    RTX 4090 FE
    I for one really enjoy the new look. Always thought the original looked kind of strange, almost low quality. This new UI is much sleeker and prettier. Good job Unwinder.

    And thank you thank you thank you so much for adding CPU clock speed to monitoring. I like to keep an eye on what clockspeed/vcore I am running when gaming, try to optimize around it. This helps me so much and clears up any confusion. Much appreciated.
     
  19. Unwinder

    Unwinder Ancient Guru Staff Member

    Messages:
    17,126
    Likes Received:
    6,690
    I'm thinking about making monitoring threshold warning in monitoring window less intrusive. Beta 2 constantly display a warning message when some threshold is reached, which can be annoying and I'm trying to improve the approach using the following way:

    - Blinking warning icon (similar to camera icon during recording) will be displayed in top left corner of monitoring window instead of message. Similar to recording icon, threshold warning icon will be also visible in Logitech keyboard LCD.
    - The message telling which graph's threshold is reached is now moved to monitoring status bar. Which means that you can enable monitoring status bar and still quickly identify the name of graph, which needs your attention, without eating space in monitoring area by overlapping message like it is done in beta 2.
    - Background of the graphs with threshold warning will be highlighted with color, to allow you to identify them visually without peeking into status bar.

    Something like that:

    [​IMG]

    Anyone have better suggestions? I'm trying to keep a balance between simple way I used in EVGA Precision (sound alarm) and complex configurable way of original RT task scheduler, where you could assign custom tasks (e.g. system shutdown, custom hardware profile load etc) to such events.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2017
  20. boogieman

    boogieman Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    1,984
    Likes Received:
    49
    GPU:
    MSI GTX 1080X
    What about something similar to Steam where a box above the system tray would pop up, for example when a friend comes online line for a few seconds in conjunction with your idea.

    If logging is taking place while in a full screen game/app, it would be nice not to have to peek at all.
     

Share This Page