Hello, Since ATI has dropped the Control Panel and I do not want to use .NET and/or CCC, I was looking for an alternative. I already used some tools on the side: Radlinker for settings and ATITool for fan settings. One thing they both not supported was disabling use of DDC information, which is essential to me. Looking further I found Rivatuner and ATI Tray Tools. ATT made me rather happy, because it would mean I would not need ATI CP, Radlinker and ATITool anymore and soon I dropped the Rivatuner. I dug into ATT and noticed that not everything was as good as it seems. After the first few uses I noticed it lacked two thing: ATITool (0.24) supports fancontrol without starting the program itself. Great that you can set the PCI Latency, but how can I read my current setting? (for this I found no reliable small program; SiSoft is too big). Later on I found a few other things: ATI Tray Tools sets the settings totally different from ATITool, Radlinker and Control Panel: Geometric Instancing shows up has disabled in Radlinker, Control Panel after activating it in ATT. The same is true for Texture compression (if I am not mistaken) and Vsync. A.I. is shown as unrecognized/disabled in ATITool and Radlinker after setting it with ATT and when I check with Regmon I see why: ATT sets the setting CatalystAI to 2, while if I am corect setting is something like dword 32 for high. Now are those 2 programs incorrect and is ATT correct. I did not check everything, but I think ATT sets the settings differently (incorrect). Since CCC was introduced (if I am not mistaken), certain settings have values dword 30, 31, 32. In the past it would have been a simple 1, 2, 3. I would really like to continue using ATT as I think it is a really nice tool. It however does need to be reliable and I am not yet convinced of that.
First of all. ATT doesn't apply settings to FAN and overclocking without itself. So you have to start it to apply profiles. Now about settings. Nothing wrong with ATT, believe me I don't know how RadLinker and ATITool set values for 3D settings, but Catalyst itself works in two modes. First mode is old CP mode where you can see separate settings for D3D and OGL. For D3D settings all values are stores as STRING. Second mode is CCC mode. In this mode D3D and OGL values are combined and all old STRING values saved in registry as UNICODE STRING values. But because registry doesn't have such type of values ATI programmers decided to store it as BINARY values. But Catalyst CAN read these values in both types. For example you don’t have CCC so you get first mode. Catalyst can read values as STRING and as BINARY at the same! ATT work like Catalyst. If CCC mode detected ATT will store values as UNICODE STRING, if CP mode detected all values (which should be stored as string) will be stores as STRING. Also ATT can read same value as STRING and BINARY, but other utils unable to do this. That’s why in CP mode, if you change some settings in ATT all pother utils unable to properly detect current value. Don't worry Use it because everyone uses it, because I use it for myself all time and if something will not work I will update it I think in future, ATI will remove support for CP mode from Catalyst and will continue to use BINARY type for storage. If this will happened, I will create procedure in ATT to check current version of ATT and work in CCC mode even if value for CCC doesn't present in registry at all.
I've used all 3 of these apps and ATT is correct. Radlinker has been discontinued and also hasn't been updated in quite a while. There is a little discrepency b/t ATT and ATITool regarding Catalyst AI -- ATT uses a string value in the registry while ATITool uses a DWORD, but either one works just fine, ie. they both correctly set Catalyst AI levels.
Thanks for your replies. You have convinced me to give it a more thorough look. I also did not know Radlinker was discontinued (just had not been updated for a while). Did not like it anyway, since the website is always blocked by my filter (*adlink*). I tested the A.I. setting with Direct3DMark and I see that both the setting from Radlinker as ATT are working, when running a benchmark with AF and AA enabled (btw gains I saw were 1-2% for normal and 15-20% for high A.I., which of course does not prove anything for ingame performance). I saw another post concerning the fan settings. What I did notice was that the include in profile option is emptied when re-entering the overclocking settings, while it is checked when clicking load (profile) in the fan tab. It is just cosmetic, as the right fan settings are applied. I do have some input, I hope you appreciate it: - A way to show what the default/previous/original PCI Latency was - PCI Latency is under general, while I would not consider it a general option, maybe drop general and put those options somewhere else (under a tab). - Could the pop-up menu of ATT be made flexible (disable/re-arrange certain items)? - Could it be possible to double click ATT to open 1 menu with all options under tabs. Maybe use a side-menu as CCC? - I would like to set my setting in general for OGL and D3D as I could with Radlinker (I always set them more or less the same). - Option to close ATT after it has run on start-up and applied the profiles. Quite a few requests, but even the way it works now I am extremely happy (content). The more programs I can drop the better (I said bye bye to CP, Radlinker and ATITool). [edit] Forgot 2 things: 1. Happy new year!!!:cheers: 2. Program is nice and compact, uses very few resources and no noticeable memory leaks. In other words: great programming. [/edit]
I will think about some of your ideas, but some of them already implemented. Look for Command line options to load profile and exit from ATT. With CCC you will not be able to set OGL and D3D in separate places. Only in old CP mode. For GUI cosmetic ideas. May be in future I will add some kind of wizzards and common dialogs
Thanks for your quick reply. I will look into the commandline options, should not be too difficult. The CCC is not an option for me. Only .NET application I am willing to use is nLite and that 1 I can use without the complete package. Maybe when I really have to I will use .NET, but next time it will be on my system, is when I install Windows Vista.
I finally got everything the way I wanted thanks for the help. 1 thing I would like to know, if you want to tell: where is the DDC setting stored? I have looked myself, but I can not trace it back to any register setting or file on disc. I used FileMon and Regmon from Sysinternals, but I was without any luck. Also not on any forum is there any useful information on this and googling gives no insight either.
Can not say exactly where Catalyst stores this information. ATT uses Catalyst internal command to operate with DDC options, so all information stored by Catalyst itself
I use recently ATT software with a graphics board x850 XT EP. I don't anderstand some value for memory timing parameters. At first run, the displayed values are ATT default parameters for R480/481 or internal vga bios parameters ? The value displayed for TRAS by example is not compatible with the value indicated in SAMSUNG datasheet for the type of memory used on PCB.
I am not sure, but I think they are read from the card. There could always be something wrong with reading them out. There are quite a few timings. I tried to change them in the past and for me it had no advantage. Some timings could be set a tiny bit faster, but then my overclock is not stable anymore and I need to lower that. This meant, that I had no advantage from it or the tiny advantage got even smaller. I can only imagine, that people make there timings worse, to increase their overclock, which will negate the effect and can cause a significant boost in performance.
Are you talking about the EDID string? It's stored here: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\DISPLAY\DELA008\5&35454ce7&7&10000084&01&00\Device Parameters] where "DELA008" should be replaced w/the id of your monitor.
