MSI AB / RTSS development news thread

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

20. It was 1997 and I needed something to overclock and tune my Riva 128.

 

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.

 

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

 

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:



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.