MSI AB / RTSS development news thread

https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/rtss-6-7-0-beta-1.412822/page-39#post-5476071

 

Once again, I'd really like to avoid digging into things unrelated to new functionality.

 

Once again, let's focus on testing new functionality _please_.

 

Note for those who translate MSI AB GUI:

Besides new controls to be localized, please pay attention to updated context help for many existing controls in "Monitoring" tab. Help for some items located there was appended with new hints related to new multi-selection related functionality, e.g. graphs list, "Show in OSD" etc.

 

Cause is not RTSS frame limiter. Cause is singletrheaded DOS application architecture, doing everything including rendering and input sampling in one thread. Adding active busy-wait framepacing to the same thread leaves no time for other background tasks, which were performed in idle in emulated application.

 

I’ve got a few similar PMs about adding more custom sensors to hardware monitoring module via recently introduced HwInfo and PerfCounter plugins. So I decided to write a small guide. As you probably noticed (and had to read in the release notes ) currently the plugins import fixed and limited set of data sources from HwInfo/AIDA/native OS performance monitor into MSI AB, but the list of imported data can be extended via editing the plugin configuration file. That’s what I’m going to demonstrate now, for example let’s assume that we need to add disk queue length monitoring for our first HDD in the system via PerfCounter plugin. Disk queue length is showing how many disk read/write requests are currently waiting for processing in queue, so it can be useful for diagnosing HDD access bottlenecks. To simplify this task, each plugin is able to export full list of importable data (i.e. full list of HwInfo/AIDA/OS performance counters) into the log file. So we can examine full list of data, which can be monitored on our system and add new desired data source to our plugin.
So, to add such custom performance counter to hardware monitoring, perform the following steps:

- Enable PerfCounter.dll plugin
- Edit .\Plugins\Monitoring\PerfCounter.cfg and set Export= 1 in [Settings] section, save it and restart MSI Afterburner. This will cause the plugin to export full set of importable data to .\Plugins\Monitoring\PerfCounter.log
- Examine PerfCounter.log and find exact name of desired performance counter, in our case it is located in "PhysicalDisk" object and called “Current Disk Queue Length”.

Code:

Object PhysicalDisk
  Counters
    Current Disk Queue Length
    % Disk Time
    Avg. Disk Queue Length
    % Disk Read Time
    Avg. Disk Read Queue Length
    % Disk Write Time
    Avg. Disk Write Queue Length
    Avg. Disk sec/Transfer
    Avg. Disk sec/Read
    Avg. Disk sec/Write
    Disk Transfers/sec
    Disk Reads/sec
    Disk Writes/sec
    Disk Bytes/sec
    Disk Read Bytes/sec
    Disk Write Bytes/sec
    Avg. Disk Bytes/Transfer
    Avg. Disk Bytes/Read
    Avg. Disk Bytes/Write
    % Idle Time
    Split IO/Sec
  Instances
    0 C: D: E:
    _Total

- Edit .\Plugins\Monitoring\PerfCounter.cfg and add new section for data source, identifying desired performance counter. It is important to specify exact name of object, counter to identify desired performance counter and instance index to identify desired HDD:

Code:

[Source15]
ObjectName = PhysicalDisk
InstanceIndex = 0
CounterName = Current Disk Queue Length
Name = HDD1 disk queue length
NameTemplate  = HDD%d disk queue length
Units =
MaxLimit = 10
MinLimit = 0
Group = HDD1
GroupTemplate = HDD%d

- Don’t forget to edit .\Plugins\Monitoring\PerfCounter.cfg and restore Export= 0 in [Settings] section. Exporting full set of available performance counters is eating performance so we don’t have to keep it enabled.

Done! Similar principle can be used to import ANY data from AIDA/HwInfo and add it to the plugins.

 

The only requirement is shared memory interface support in HwInfo. AFAIR, export sensors to shared memory is supported in HwInfo since 2014, so any newer build is ok.

Yes, HwInfo (or AIDA in case of using AIDA plugin) needs to be running to supply the data. For HwInfo plugin HwInfo sensors window must be also open and desired sensors must be enabled in it (otherwise it doesn't poll sensors unlike AIDA) and "Shared Memory Support" must be enabled in both applications.
PerfCounter plugin doesn't need running any additional applications, it is extracting data directly from OS.

 

Marc, HwInfo plugin is configured to display its "VCore" sensor in MSI Afterburner's "CPU voltage" graph. If you don't have such sensor available in HwInfo - you'll get no data. If you wish it to take data from core VID instead - you have to reconfigure the plugin.

 

That's definitively not supposed to be so, thanks for reporting. Seems like min/max limits can be specified as integers only for data sources imported from plugins, things like that is exactly what I was talking about when asked everyone to focus on new functionality during beta testing. At least somebody really _test_ new GUI, thanks a lot, Marc!

 

Just started investigating it deeper, false alarm, it is supposed to be this way. Limits are visualized on the graph as rounded integers if difference between min and max limits is greater that 1. So 0-2 range should be displayed as integers, but 0-1 should be displayed as floating point 0.0-1.0. Summarizing, if you define maximum limit as 1.5 and leave default minimum as 0, limits will be rounded to integers while displaying (i.e. 0-2). Setting minimum to 0.5 will make it displayed as floating point number.