Getting the Most Out Of Your Hardware: Video Card Utility Roundup
by Ryan Smith on July 5, 2007 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
NVIDIA Control Panel & nTune
NVIDA's utility set earns the special distinction of being by far the largest download out of all of the utilities we're looking at today. While we can't isolate the exact size of the package because they bundle their NVIDIA Control Panel with their drivers, and their nTune application for both their video cards and motherboards, the net weight of the package is a massive 82MB. The actual memory usage of this varies depending on what sub-controls are accessed, we've seen it use as little as 16MB when using text based controls, or as high as 45MB when using the image preview controls, the latter putting it on par with the Catalyst Control Center. The load times for the application average several seconds on our test system, which is faster than the Catalyst Control Center but slower than any of the third-party utilities we're looking at.
As we noted previously, NVIDIA's utilities are split in to two parts as a result of the preparation work they did for Vista. The Forceware driver package comes with the NVIDIA Control Panel which offers adjustments to 3D settings, displays, and colors, while the nTune package contains all of the controls for overclocking, system tuning, and hardware monitoring. Since nTune supports video cards and motherboards it has an easy time meeting the criteria we laid out earlier about what to expect in a video card utility, however as an NVIDIA product designed for NVIDIA motherboards, it's somewhat impotent when placed on a non-NVIDIA motherboard as compared to a third-party utility like ATI Tray Tools or RivaTuner. For the remainder of this article, we'll simply refer to these two packages as the combined NVIDIA utility set.
Although we're focusing on advanced features for enthusiasts here, it should be mentioned how similar the basic and advanced modes of the NVIDIA utility set are. Whereas we accused the Catalyst Control Center of being too basic earlier, we accuse NVIDIA of being too advanced. ATI does a far better job of laying out their controls for basic users and using image previews to showcase what effects various 3D settings will have.
Like ATI, NVIDIA offers excellent monitor and video quality controls, where the difference lies is in those important features we identified earlier. 3D settings offers control over the usual anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, but also offers control over threading optimization and more importantly triple buffering. As a nice touch on the side, the 3D settings sub-control also lists what each feature does.
More importantly, these options carry over into NVIDIA's game profile system, which allows custom per-game settings. Here the profile system is both a curse and a blessing due to some design issues, SLI controls, and its integration with nTune. Profiles are required for using SLI since SLI generally needs to be configured differently for each game; NVIDIA includes pre-programmed profiles for most new games but SLI control for non-profiled games is lacking.
This feeds into a more general UI problem where the spacious settings panel is split into two parts: a list of profiles and the settings for that profile. Neither is large enough to comfortably work with, and the profile list in particular is only big enough to show four profiles at once among hundreds of profiles. This is just bad UI design even for the lower standards we'd hold for a video card utility. Last, nTune and the NVIDIA Control Panel aren't integrated here at all, requiring the user to create separate profiles in different parts of the utility set for 3D settings and for hardware performance settings; other utilities such as ATI Tray Tools manage to mix these controls without difficulty. While these issues aren't enough to make the profile system unusable, it's an area for improvement for NVIDIA.
On hardware performance, NVIDIA offers decent overclocking controls but not surprisingly doesn't offer the advanced (and likely hardware breaking) features that third-party utilities can offer. Thankfully clock frequencies are not heavily constrained; we could try to take our 8800GTX to the silly speeds of 1152/1100 if we want, which is more than enough headroom to get the most out of our card. Fan control is also available for some cards.
For monitoring all of this performance NVIDIA offers a decent external application that can keep track of system and GPU temperatures. Unfortunately it's probably the ugliest utility we've ever seen, using a clone of Mac OS X's brushed metal and breaking most Windows UI conventions in the process. A stability tester/artifact scanner is also offered, along with an automatic overclocking application. Serious overclockers will likely want to use another tool; it's fine for mild overclocks but if you're approaching the edge of stability NVIDIA's artifact scanner doesn't appear to be nearly as aggressive at heating up the GPU as ATITool's is.
On the whole NVIDIA's utility set is respectable but not notably impressive. Unlike the Catalyst Control Center it has enough advanced features that most users can get by on it but there are still better options. All things equal, third-party utilities can offer the same features with a fraction of the bloat or load times, but for those who don't find the bloat a major nuisance it will do what they need. For everyone else there's RivaTuner.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
17 Comments
View All Comments
takumsawsherman - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
AMD/ATI and NVIDIA are totally out of control. It's like they put 13-year olds in charge of the design, and State Government bureacrats are the programmers. I will focus on ATI, though NVIDIA seems to want to follow in their footsteps.1. Huge resource hog - the article mentions this, but one has to sit and time it themselves to realize what garbage this software is. Insane load times, just to switch output to a TV, or make basic adjustments. My trusty old Matrox G400Max 8 years ago in a matter of a few seconds, and the image looked better on TV as well. Speaking of Output to TV (or another monitor), under the old control panel, it was a check box. Now, one has to drag an icon of a TV into a box. Genius.
2. Speaking of 13 year olds, what is with the cartoon characters dominating the interface. Am I supposed to get excited seeing that? Is it supposed to reward me for my waiting? And the stupid buttons that are harder to see than normal buttons, on top of brushed metal? Awesome, dude! Why not have a nice control panel, that has all of the controls within an intuitive system, somewhat like what Matrox used to have with Powerdesk? Hell, with that system, I could increment the refresh rate until I reached the limit of my Viewsonic at 116hz. That is power, and control.
There is more that I could detail, but I need to get back to work. But no apologies should be made for the teams that design these monstrosities. They are not suitable for basic users. Basic users would think that perhaps their computer was not working, based on the load time. They are not suitable at all, and they should literally be thrown in the garbage. The people responsible for approving these designs, and team responsible for creating the design and basing it on .NET, should be fired. Then maybe somebody like Andy Hertzfeld should be brought in to lead the new teams.
I thought that with AMD's purchase of ATI, this outcome would be fast-tracked. Unfortunately, whoever was in charge probably still is in charge.
PrinceGaz - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Good article, I think I'll have a look at ATITool as that sounds ideal for my needs (I already use nHancer and have used RivaTuner in the past).My question is why are there no links to any of the third-party utilities you are so enthusiastic about? I know they're easy enough to find with a quick search, but it seems strange that you don't provide links to their official site. I assume it isn't because in at least one case it would mean linking to a site which probably competes with AT for ads and visitors? :)
Spoelie - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Specifically, getting it to do all the clock/voltage/fan changing (auto 3D overclocking feature) instead of the standard drivers, made my x1950xt with even the standard HSF a very pleasant card.2d clocks standard 500/600 @var fan (minimum 29%), now 300/400 @22% constant fan.
3d clocks standard 625/900 @var fan (up to 70%+), now 625/900 @59% constant fan.
+ fcourse voltage changes
For older games that do not need as much grunt, you can set an exception so it uses the 2D clocks, for completely silent gaming. Configuring the fan at a constant not-too-loud speed that is sufficient to cool the GPU at the 3D clocks, gets rid of the fan winding up and down during gaming annoyance.
And all the other goodies, for icing on the cake ^^
yacoub - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
ATITool would be perfect if its dynamic temperature-sensor-based fan throttling worked on more cards. It's hard to tell if the issue is with card hardware or with ATITool's developer, but either way it's frustrating to have a high-end GPU and yet not be able to have the fan throttle with detected temps per user settings. This worked perfectly on my 9800Pro and X800XL, but does not work at all on my 7900GT and apparently doesn't work right on X1900 series ATi cards not 8800 series NVidia cards either.It's a shame, because ATITool is such an awesome little program otherwise. It's by far much more user-friendly and easy to configure than something like RivaTuner (last I checked, which was a while ago).
Spoelie - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Ati tray tools has the support you mentioned for the X1xxx range of cards, try that for a change.yacoub - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
"not" should be "nor".Also I should add that SpeedFan manages to do this temp-based fan throttling wonderfully for my CPU and has for a couple years now. I want this ability for my GPU as well, as I was able to do with older gen GPUs.... how can we LOSE this feature when things are supposed to IMPROVE with newer generation hardware?
It's especially troublesome since the latest GPUs all seem to run a really low setting in Windows and FULL BLAST in 3D gaming. It's an on/off switch instead of a dynamic throttle the way ATITool is capable of doing (with older cards).
strikeback03 - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Speedfan has not worked with either of the hardware combos I have tried it with. I'm gonna see if any of these GPU utilities can keep my video card fan from turning on randomly though.I'd be happy if the nVidia utility would let me disable the popup message about "SLI is disabled" every time the computer is turned on, considering the motherboard does not support SLI and there has never been a second video card.
The Boston Dangler - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
yeah, speedfan is great. try rivatuner for controlling vid fan speeds.The Boston Dangler - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Although you state that AMD and Nvidia need to do much better, you were way too soft on them. Perhaps your experiences have been much better than my own.No mention of Coolbits or NVTempLogger? Maybe because they are XP-only?
I dumped ATI years ago due to their weak hardware, CCC + .NET was the last straw. That, and the media thingy was nothing more than WMP with ATI's skin. Pure garbage. At very least, it let me have ANY video source as wallpaper, about 5 years before Vista's Dreamscene or whatever it's called.
That leaves Nvidia. Under XP, the old control panel was excellent. Coolbits added freq adjustments, RivaTuner did not integrate. All other settings were easily laid out for me to tinker with, and very functional. However, the new-fangled control panel had only about 10% of the settings as the old one. The nTune utility was 100% fatal to my motherboard, freezing up the moment the .exe was run. This was on an Asus A8N32-SLI, the premiere mobo of the day. So sad...
Now that I've regrettably installed Vista, I'm stuck with the moronic new control panel. After manually enabling visibility of every possible setting, I'm left with a tiny fraction of the settings I had under XP. Many of these will do nothing, some will break apps or the entire machine. nTune now works under Vista, although the one and only thing it does is monitor and log vid temps. I look at the screen shots AT posts and I wonder "Where the Hell did my settings and monitoring go?"
Although you didn't get into PureVideo in this piece, I'd like to bring it up. Where do they get off charging me for a driver, for the hardware I already purchased? Unlike Creative, support was stated, and it's functionality was promised. "Now with PureVideo technology" and "Free PureVideo support in this driver release". I, and many others, interpreted that to mean the PureVideo software was included. WRONG. It remains $20 - $50. I tried the demo, and what does $20 - $50 get you? Crap. After much fiddling, I was able to match the PQ I had without PV. It works with only this player and that file type, which covers about zero of my PC vid watching. For DVD's, my Denon DVD player whips PV and AVIVO's asses, every goddamn time. It isn't worth "free", nevermind $50.
Excuse me if I drifted into a rant, but it's frustrating. The disparity between the quality of hardware and software seems to be growing right across the board, no pun intended.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
There's a common misconception between PureVideo the hardware, and PureVideo the software; this was a poor choice in naming by Nvidia. The entire suite of PureVideo hardware features can be access by any application using the DXVA interface and some knowledge of what features are available. The latest versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD have no problem here.The problem is that when Nvidia was shipping its earliest PureVideo hardware, the support from Cyberlink(PowerDVD) and Intervideo(WinDVD) wasn't where Nvidia wanted it, so they created their own MPEG2 decoder in order to showcase what the hardware could do. They eventually called this decoder the PureVideo Decoder, and this was their mistake. Thankfully this problem is slowly going away; I've heard there won't be any more updates to the PureVideo Decoder so it will ultimately be discontinued.