So ATi people

S

Sycraft

Supreme [H]ardness
2FA
Joined
Nov 9, 2006
Messages
7,235
I got a 5870 but I've been an nVidia guy for years so I'm not up on what are good tools for ATi cards. In particular I'm looking for something that can display frame rates and maybe temperatures as an overlay in games. I'm a geek so I like to test these things :D.

Suggestions?
 
If you're just looking for an eVGA Precision type of thing, try Afterburner. It has the same overlay function as Precision (RivaTuner Statistic Server).

It'll work with non-MSI cards too.
 
Looks promising. Precision is the sort of thing I'm after (my previous card is an EVGA GTX 280). I just like to see what FPS I get, how hot the card gets, and what my power draw is. My UPS gives me power, but I need a utility like that for the rest.

I'm always interested in how a new card compares objectively to an old one. Already I can say that it is a good deal quieter, which makes me happy. The 280 made a lot of noise in games like Mass Effect. The 5870 doesn't seem to.
 
For power monitoring, I'd probably go with GPU-Z. Afterburner can show you GPU voltage in graphs/OSD if you want it to, but weird things happen with the 58xx cards if you have more than 1 utility polling those registers. Afterburner actually comes with voltage monitoring disabled by default. GPU-Z is better for that anyway IMO because it'll show you amperage draw plus the temps for all the VRMs.

That's one thing Afterburner doesn't do that it ought to - show you "PCB temp" like Precision. But you can tell GPU-Z to log that stuff to a file.
 
Power I'm interested in overall system draw, in particular the difference between game and no game. My UPS does that real well. I don't OC or anything, it is just a case of personal interest.
 
Ah, OK. I do overclock, so making sure I'm not melting the power components on my board does interest me :)

Between Afterburner and your UPS readouts, I think you'll have all the info you're after.
 
Yep I've been messing with it here and the results are good. Card is extremely cool. 75 degrees is the highest I could get it in the Heaven benchmark. Doesn't even break 70 in any games I tried. My 280 would run over 90 in games like Mass Effect.

Power draw seems the same at idle as the 280 was, but a lot less under load. The total system load (computer and monitor) never seems to go over 250 watts, where with the GTX 280 I could break 330 pretty easy.

All in all I call this card a winner.
 
Yep, I'm happy with mine (a 5850). I've been Green for 3 1/2 years but Ati deserves some love for this product... if only TSMC could spit out the silicon at a decent clip.

From my perspective, as someone who overclocks and uses water to do so, the power efficiency makes my life a lot easier. This card is dumping significantly less heat into my loop than my previous 285, and runs my current games better at the same time. The only thing I really miss is driver-level ability to set AA/AF, etc. configs for individual games. I have to go 3rd party for that functionality.

But, yeah. RV870 is a winner.
 
doesn't the Catalyst Control Center give you those temp readings as well?...it's listed under the Overdrive section...or is the CCC not a reliable graphics card monitoring tool?
 
polonyc2 said:
doesn't the Catalyst Control Center give you those temp readings as well?...it's listed under the Overdrive section...or is the CCC not a reliable graphics card monitoring tool?
Click to expand...

It's reliable, insofar as it's probably as accurate as anything else. It polls the same things. But it seems to have an excessive amount of CPU overhead, at least according to Unwinder, the guy responsible for RivaTuner and the statistics portions of Afterburner and eVGA Precision. He wrote his own code for Afterburner's monitoring functions because the AMD code for it was so woefully inefficient.

Gonna dig for his own comments on the matter... Ah, found them.

All

Good news, I've finally received 5870 sample from MSI, so now I can see what else can I squeeze from this bit of hardware for Afterburner.
First, I now understand why some users claimed that there was some kind of stuttering in games when Afterburner's hardware monitor is active. AMD's own GPU usage and runtime clocks monitoring routine, provided by their new "shiny" ADL SDK is deadly, terribly SLOOOOOOOOOOW on 58xx hardware. Thanks AMD, as usual. I cannot even guess what can the driver do duing approximately 30ms (!!!!) on each call of this routine, that is DEADLY expensive for monitoring software and I'm pretty sure that it can be optimized up to 30x times, it shouldn't eat more than 1ms if implemented properly. So probably I'll replace AMD's monitoring implementation with my own one. Sadly, as usual with AMD software, take everything AMD provides, throw it away and write it yourself. Seriously, instead of attacking CUDA, PhysX and TWIMTBP the company should invest more softdev and devrel resources into their own APIs. Developers will keep chosing NV and prefer to work with NV APIs, if AMD's ones will stay in such terrible state.
Click to expand...

Actual post here.

Current version of Afterburner has its own driver for this stuff.
 
Also try Gainward ExperTool ATI v4.2. It is another app that works for monitoring fan speed and for overclocking.
 
Painman said:
It's reliable, insofar as it's probably as accurate as anything else. It polls the same things. But it seems to have an excessive amount of CPU overhead, at least according to Unwinder, the guy responsible for RivaTuner and the statistics portions of Afterburner and eVGA Precision. He wrote his own code for Afterburner's monitoring functions because the AMD code for it was so woefully inefficient.

Gonna dig for his own comments on the matter... Ah, found them.

Current version of Afterburner has its own driver for this stuff.
Click to expand...

I also recently bought a 5870 card after years of using Nvidia cards...so is installing the CCC not recommended?...is downloading the ATI drivers by themselves better along with this Afterburner program?
 
polonyc2 said:
I also recently bought a 5870 card after years of using Nvidia cards...so is installing the CCC not recommended?...is downloading the ATI drivers by themselves better along with this Afterburner program?
Click to expand...

Well, you'll still need some way of tweaking AA, AF, and all that stuff. If you forego CCC, then you'll need another app like ATi Tray Tools or something in order to do that. CCC gets the job done, and if you simply ignore the Overdrive tab and use an app like Afterburner instead for OCing and monitoring, you'll be fine. The crappy AMD hardware monitoring drivers won't hurt you if you simply have CCC installed; they'll only crap on you if you open CCC to the Overdrive tab while you're gaming or benching.

Just pretend that tab in CCC doesn't exist, and you'll be good to go... ;)
 
Painman said:
Well, you'll still need some way of tweaking AA, AF, and all that stuff. If you forego CCC, then you'll need another app like ATi Tray Tools or something in order to do that. CCC gets the job done, and if you simply ignore the Overdrive tab and use an app like Afterburner instead for OCing and monitoring, you'll be fine. The crappy AMD hardware monitoring drivers won't hurt you if you simply have CCC installed; they'll only crap on you if you open CCC to the Overdrive tab while you're gaming or benching.

Just pretend that tab in CCC doesn't exist, and you'll be good to go... ;)
Click to expand...

OK thanks...I remember hearing that the CCC was extremely bloated some time back so I thought maybe it was best to avoid installing it
 
polonyc2 said:
OK thanks...I remember hearing that the CCC was extremely bloated some time back so I thought maybe it was best to avoid installing it
Click to expand...

It's pretty lightweight now. Only using 3MB RAM here when minimized.
 
polonyc2 said:
OK thanks...I remember hearing that the CCC was extremely bloated some time back so I thought maybe it was best to avoid installing it
Click to expand...

You're not mistaken; its RAM usage used to suck terribly. It's improved. I can see Catalyst gobbling up about 3.7 MB total system RAM on my box right now across 2 processes via Task Manager. Afterburner is actually much worse at 16.2 MB.

But, while I have 8 GB total system RAM, it's hard to quibble about these quantities. Even if it was 4 GB, we'd be talking about Catalyst eating up 3.7/4096 and AB eating up 16.2/4096. Chump change.

OS and apps might be getting large, but drivers and utilities seem to be relatively static. They don't need to grow huge in order to do their jobs.
 
Painman said:
You're not mistaken; its RAM usage used to suck terribly. It's improved. I can see Catalyst gobbling up about 3.7 MB total system RAM on my box right now across 2 processes via Task Manager. Afterburner is actually much worse at 16.2 MB.
Click to expand...

I'm surprised Afterburner uses so much RAM...especially considering how the author of the program blasts ATI for not optimizing their software
 
polonyc2 said:
I'm surprised Afterburner uses so much RAM...especially considering how the author of the program blasts ATI for not optimizing their software
Click to expand...

Well, efficiency of code over time doesn't equate to efficiency of code over space I suppose (though I'm not a coder). :)

I'm also surprised by AB's bulk, but like I said, across a 4 GB system it's not much. Most games are still strictly 32 bit and won't utilize more than 2 GB on their own unless they're made to be large address aware.
 
In fact the opposite is often true. You have very small code, but it ends up being slower than larger code. You can trade size for time in many cases with programming.

Also in terms of development there are things such as managed languages like .NET. They make coding much easier and faster, and deal with bugs, but generally generate much larger memory footprints.

However I'm with you in that memory is cheap, just get more and don't worry. While using a minimal amount of memory is a nice goal in theory, in practice I'd rather have programs that are developed quicker, and that are more bug free if it means larger code. Disk space and memory is cheap.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top