Riva tuner update: RTSS Rivatuner Statistics Server 7.2.3 Download

Setting up MSI Afterburner: [Settings guide] (2019)

After Riva Tuner was discontinued, MSI Afterburner was released based on it.

Its functions include: overclocking GPUs by increasing the voltage of key elements, increasing the frequency of the memory and graphics chip, controlling the speed of the cooler and monitoring the current state of the graphics card.

How to use MSI Afterburner, and what it is, we will consider below.

The utility monitors the temperature dynamics of the device and can display warnings about exceeding the critical temperature value (set by the user) of the graphics chip.

Contents:

Install MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner is downloaded from our website at this link, you can also download it from the Russian version of its official support resource located at the link.

1. After clicking on it, click «Download Afterburner» and wait for the archive with the installer to load.

Fig. 1 — Download program

2. Unpack the compressed file using an archiver or file manager.

Fig. 2 — Unpacking the archive through 7Z

3. Specify the interface language and click OK.

Fig. 3 — Selecting the interface language

4. In the remaining windows, click «Next», specifying the path to install the program.

Fig. 4 — Specify the installation path

5. After copying and registering files, start Afterburner.

Fig. 5 — Launching Afterburner after installing

It is recommended to restart the computer afterward to correctly determine the operating parameters of the graphics adapter.

After starting the program, its interface with the main data will appear on the display: the current parameters of the graphic processor and its state.

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Stylish Afterburner

The default skin for the program is not very convenient to use, so many users immediately change it to be more friendly.

To do this, call «Settings» by clicking on the gear icon in the center of the window.

Fig. 6 — Button for calling application settings

Then go to the tab «Interface» and in the third subsection «Properties of skins …» choose a more suitable type of application design.

It also indicates its language, temperature format (Celsius / Fahrenheit) and time.

In the «Basic» tab, select the graphics processor to be configured if a pair of video cards is used or, in addition to the integrated one, a discrete one is also installed.

If there are two identical devices working in conjunction, check the option to synchronize their settings.

Fig.7 — Selecting the default video card

The left panel contains data with numbers about the current value of the frequency of the graphics processor and video memory.

To the right, the current temperature and voltage are displayed.

Fig. 8 — Information panel

The central part of the interface is occupied by a frame with sliders, with the help of which the regulation is carried out:

• core voltage;
• power limit;
• boundary temperature;
• graphics core frequency;
• memory frequency;
• the number of revolutions of the cooler.

Fig. 9 — Frame for overclocking video card

Under the frame, next to the button for calling the settings window, there is a button for resetting the settings to factory settings.

Fig. 10 — Button for resetting settings

The lower part of the MSI Afterburner interface is occupied by a monitoring window with graphs of temperature and other operating parameters of the graphics card.

Fig. 11 — Key indicators monitoring window

The last important element of the interface is the panel for managing overclocking profiles and switching between them.

Fig. 12 — Preset Management

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Simple Voltage Control Rules

The program allows you to adjust the voltage on the master graphics adapter.

Depending on its microarchitecture and the chip used, the parameter may be displayed in millivolts or percentage of the original value.

By default, the option is disabled on all devices, except branded ones (by MSI). To activate it, you need to go to the main settings of the application and enable the corresponding option.

Several modes are available here: for reference chips, for chips from MSI and third-party graphics adapters.

Fig. 13 — Unlocking the voltage control function

If, after enabling the setting, it is still inactive (greyed out), refer to the GPU manual.

Most likely, Afterburner does not support the programmable microcontroller installed on the device, even if it supports voltage control.

Increase the value of the parameter gradually, by a few percent each time, and closely monitor the temperature and stability of the video card after each change in value.

With a significant increase, the device will overheat faster and make more miscalculations, which will most likely lead to failures in the entire system, the appearance of artifacts, etc.

After reprogramming the controller, which is done by clicking on the button with a check mark, it is best to stress test the video card, for example, using the Kombuster proprietary utility.

If no deviations are noticed for a couple of hours, the indicator can be increased by a few more percent or tens of units.

Fig. 14 — Applying the new configuration

If after saving the core voltage value changes to the standard one, try to go to the settings and select a different voltage control method, but most likely it will not be possible to adjust the value through MSI Afterburner.

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Changing peak power consumption

The option is not active on all devices, it works only if the graphics adapter implements the technology of power consumption management.

Fig. 15 — Slider for changing the energy limit

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Core and video memory clock

Core Clock will help you change the maximum operating frequency of the GPU. The higher it is, the more information is processed in one cycle.

Memory Clock — a parameter that provides access to programming the video memory frequency.

Depending on the device, the values ​​can be presented explicitly or as a percentage of the original.

It costs a few percent or a couple of tens of units to increase / decrease the parameters at each step, conducting stress tests after each saving the settings or starting a «heavy» game.

In the second case, it is recommended to run RTSS, the installation of which is offered after Afterburner.

The program in the overlay (overlay) mode visualizes the current number of frames generated by the video card in the game.

Fig. 16 — Adjusting the frequency of the graphics core

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Efficient Cooling

To activate the manual change of the variable, click on the gear icon next to the Fan Speed ​​slider.

Fig. 17 — Enabling manual control of the cooler speed

If you want the system to automatically adjust the fan speed based on the current temperature of the video card, switch to automatic adjustment of the value by clicking the Auto icon.

Fig. 18 — Activate automatic fan speed control

In the «Cooler» settings section, you can specify the refresh rate of the parameter and achieve maximum cooling efficiency, minimizing fan bounce.

Fig. 19 — Changing the update period for data on the current fan speed

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Monitoring

In the Afterbuner settings tab of the same name, you can disable the visualization of unnecessary graphs and specify the peak values ​​of all indicators that are read by the program from the sensors.

When the specified value is reached, the application will warn the user about reaching the upper limit, for example, temperature.

Fig. 20 — Remove unnecessary charts from the monitoring window

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Profiles

For various situations (modern games, video processing, graphics-intensive games, 2D graphics), MSI Afterburner can save five different overclocking options.

For games, for example, the indicators responsible for the performance of the device should be increased, and for watching movies, browsing the Internet and text editors, you can reduce the power consumption of the video card.

Remarkably, switching between profiles is carried out «on the fly» by clicking on a single icon or using the keys assigned to it.

To add a preset, change the required overclocking settings in the central window and click on the «Save» icon.

Fig. 21 — Saving new settings to a separate profile

Then click on one of the flashing numbers to assign the current configuration to the corresponding cell.

In the “Profiles” settings tab, the activation of each of the presets can be assigned to a combination of hot keys that are not used in the system.

Fig. 22 — Assigning a combination of hot keys to the activation of the list of settings

Previously, the application was equipped with functions for capturing screenshots and videos from 3D games and supported various profiles for working in 3D and 2D modes, which allowed saving electricity, but in the latest versions, the developers abandoned these functions.

This guide on the topic: «How to use MSI Afterburner» can end.

And remember: overclocking a video card not only increases the risk of its premature failure, but also reduces its working life (accelerates wear).

How to set up RivaTuner and MSI Afterburner for PC monitoring

If you want to know if you can speed up your PC then RivaTuner is the perfect application for that. Thanks to this, you will be able to know the performance of your system in real time while you play.

Contents

• What is RivaTuner?
• Install MSI Afterburner before RivaTuner
  • How to use MSI Afterburner
  • Menu in MSI Afterburner
  • Settings menu in MSI Afterburner
  • Hardware Monitor in MSI Afterburner
• Installing and configuring RivaTuner

What is RivaTuner?

This is an open source application used to monitor the performance and overclocking of NVIDIA graphics cards. Its name is mainly associated with the line of NVIDIA cards released before GeForce in the late 90s of the 20th century, but this is a product not directly related to NVIDIA.

Today, this application is integrated into most overclocking applications supplied by various graphics card manufacturers. Thus, we can find it in ASUS GPU Tweak, EVGA Precision X and MSI Afterburner. Of the three tools, only one from EVGA and MSI can be downloaded from their websites.

We have selected the MSI to be installed for use with RivaTuner.

Install MSI Afterburner before RivaTuner

The first thing we need to do is download MSI Afterburner, which is distributed as a zip file, unzip it, and you will see an installation file called msiafterburnersetupxyy, ​​where x is the name version and yy is the subversion. title.

Double-click the file to start the installation, accept the typical legal terms of each installation, and ensure that the RivaTuner Statistics Server check box is checked.

From there, you just have to click Next and wait for it to install, which will happen in a very short time as it is a very lightweight program.

How to use MSI Afterburner

The MSI Afterburner window is very easy to use, we have a main window with two columns of options on the left and right. For now we will focus on the central part where we can see the following options:

At the back of the window we have real time information about the GPU, its clock speed, memory clock speed, voltage and temperature. They are delivered in real time by the telemetry systems of the GPU itself.

However, at the bottom it is divided into three different sections:

• The first section is used to control the voltage, which is expressed in millivolts, from here you can do step-down and over-voltage exercises.
• The second section allows us to control the GPU clock speed and VRAM interface. This section also tells you which GPU is used in our system and the version of the driver installed.
• The third section is for controlling the fan speed, temperature and power consumption of the graphics card.
• We have a section where we can save the profile we have created. If we click on the floppy disk icon, we will see the numbers in the panel on the right light up, select one and there you can save the specified profile.

Menu in MSI Afterburner

As for the menu on the left, we have the following options:

• The first option on the menu on the left activates the help, which takes us to the MSI page, so for the moment we are not going to pay attention to this Attention, having help on hand is not always a bad thing.
• The second option is the info icon, which will give us more detailed information about our system, but not much more complete than the DXDiag console.
• The third option is the settings we will discuss in the next section.

On the other hand, the menu on the right is used to directly select profiles, the padlock icon if selected prevents selection of options such as starting MSI Afterburner when Windows starts or saves profiles, the other four options refer to the selection of each of them. one of 4 profiles.

Settings menu in MSI Afterburner

We have a total of four tabs, the first of which allows us to choose whether we want the tool to run on Windows startup or not, and also we can choose the way the program manages graphics card voltage as well as control of the same where we can deactivate voltage control and even set a constant voltage to avoid speed drops.

The second tab is the monitoring tab where we can choose how we want the information to be presented to us, you can add and remove fields, set the font type and even the color to make the information easy to read.

In it we can select a number of options such as information update period where we can select every few milliseconds so that the monitoring graph is updated, this will affect the x-axis and therefore the time of the monitoring graph.

As for the properties of the graph, if we have selected the option display information on the screen (OSD) then you can consider it as an additional hub in games without the need for a second window, use it if you do not have a second monitor, but especially to know whether the game overloads the graphics or, otherwise, there is room to increase the clock speed. You can also make it appear on the Windows taskbar by selecting show in system tray and even some integrated MSI LCD keypads if we select the option to display information on the keypad LCD of the unit.

The third tab corresponds to profiles from which we can create keyboard shortcuts to be able to switch from one profile to another, this is a tab that has no more secrets and no more complexity.

The fourth and last interface menu tab, here you can choose which type of interface for MSI Afterburner is more practical, as well as the way information is presented.

Hardware Monitor in MSI Afterburner

If we select the menu icon where you see the graphics monitor, the one at the bottom, we will see the window that controls the GPU opens, giving us the following information:

• GPU1 workload, in case you have a gaming laptop it will be dedicated graphics that takes up that space, if your computer has an integrated GPU you will also see a series of equivalent graphics.
• There are a number of graphs for monitoring the GPU: GPU FB refers to memory channel usage with its VRAM, GPU VID usage monitors dedicated voltage GPU/GPU PCI Express bus usage that links the CPU to the dedicated GPU, this chart does not exist for dedicated charts.
• GPU1 and GPU2 memory usage reports to us how much VRAM they use, not to be confused with memory bus usage.
• Main clock indicates the speed of each of the two GPUs, while the memory clock does the same but with that of VRAM.
• Regarding the GPU health status, the information graphic is as follows: GPU Power monitors the GPU power consumption, GPU Temp the temperature at any time, GPU power limit indicates the time when the GPU has approached your power limit. Instead of GPU Voltage Limit refers to when the GPU is close to its voltage limit.
• The graph also gives us information about the temperatures and usage of each of the CPU cores, as well as clock speeds.

Once this is done, we only need to play around with RivaTuner a bit, but for that we need to install it first.

Installing and configuring RivaTuner

The process is the same as in MSI Afterburner, the download will be in the form of a zip file that you will need to unzip once you double click on the RTSSSSetupXYY. exe file which is the installer. Once you launch it, choose your language and start the installation, which is simple and doesn’t involve any additional complications.

Once you have installed it run it, unfortunately the installer does not launch the application directly and you will have to look for it in the start menu. When you launch it, it will be placed on the system tray on the right.

If you click its icon, the main window will appear, now you can use the application. If you want to add a specific application for use with RivaTuner, you just need to click the «Add» button, find its executable and add it. This allows you to create different profiles for each game.

As for the options on the right, the first one is Application detection level, this helps us to more or less automatically activate RivaTuner when opening the application. If you leave it low, it will be activated when you include one of the executables assigned in the application’s database, and if high, it will do so in almost all applications. We recommend adding apps one at a time, regardless of activation.

If you activate stealth mode, the application will try to change the settings that have blocked RivaTuner, as it is disabled by default for Custom Direct3D. Frame Rate Limit allows us to cut or set the frame rate, which is ideal for preventing some games from running so fast that they cannot be played due to their high speed, Scanline Sync allows us to adjust the graph to control the beginning of V-Sync, which is a way to activate adaptive sync and eliminate annoying image tearing.

If you select On Screen Display, you can see RivaTuner information while you play, which is ideal if you’re doing benchmarks and want to monitor things like temperature, clock speed, and power consumption.

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Written exam in ShAD: problem conditions and analysis. Part One — Warm Up

Screen tear or input lag? Should I use vsync? For a very long time in the world of PC games, it was a matter of either-or. You can achieve either a tear-free picture or low input lag. But it is impossible to get both. Or is it possible?

The answer to this question is ambiguous. If you already have a modern gaming monitor that supports variable refresh rates (FreeSync or G-Sync), then you don’t need this article at all. But if you have a regular monitor with a constant refresh rate, or if you like to play games on your TV, then this article will help you reduce frame tearing and input lag.

Using the millisecond frame limit in RTSS (Rivatuner Statistics Server), low latency vsync can be achieved. What will we get as a result? Clear picture without frame breaks and 50ms less input lag than regular vsync.

This is one of the few PC enhancements that can greatly improve your gaming experience with minimal compromise and completely free. What is it? And how to achieve this? In this article, we will tell you everything in detail and step by step.

Terrible frame tearing with vsync disabled

What is input lag?

Before starting to solve the problem, it would be nice to understand what exactly we are going to do. Low latency Vsync is a technique to reduce input latency. What does this mean? When you type on the keyboard or move the mouse, there is a small, almost imperceptible delay between your action and the screen output. This delay is so small that it is measured in milliseconds. If you are using your computer to read the Internet or play casual games, this does not affect the process in a tangible way.

However, in tense situations like eSports shooters, every millisecond counts. A few milliseconds of input lag can decide the fate of a headshot or the death of your hero.

All monitors (and TVs) have a certain amount of input lag added by default. It usually depends on the type of panel being used. Default high refresh rate IPS and TN panels provide the lowest input lag. For some monitors, it is as low as 0.5 ms. VA panels typically have higher input lag, many reaching 8-10ms. TVs (which often use VA panels) tend to perform the worst, with some up to 30ms latency or more.

When vsync is disabled, the computer’s GPU sends rendered frames to the display as fast as possible. Since the frame rate on the display is limited (on 60 Hz displays it is one frame every 16.66 ms), frame tearing occurs when a new frame arrives before the previous one has disappeared from the screen.

When traditional vsync is enabled, the GPU can no longer replace the contents of the monitor buffer with a new frame before the old frame has had its 16. 66ms of glory. This means that each frame can be displayed in full and frame tearing is eliminated. However, this forces the GPU to queue up frames instead of sending them as fast as possible.

Due to queuing, traditional vsync can add up to 50ms of latency on top of the standard display latency. This is where low latency vsync comes into play.

With low-lag vsync, we are essentially limiting the frame rate (the rate at which the GPU transmits frames) to a number slightly below the monitor’s refresh rate. This prevents the GPU from sending new frames before the monitor is ready to display them. What will we get as a result? Game without frame breaks and almost the same latency as with disabled vsync. Now let’s talk about how to achieve this…

What we need

Before you start, you need to download the latest version of Rivatuner Statistics Server (RTSS). You will also need an Internet connection to go to these two pages to run the tests:
Your computer’s BIOS must have HPET (High Precision Event Timer) enabled. If for some reason you turned it off, then turn it on.

Getting Started

The first thing we need to do is determine the monitor’s true refresh rate. If you have a 60Hz display, then it’s probably very close to 60, but different by a few hundredths of a second. Use either UFO Refresh Rate Test or vsync Tester. If you have free time, then run both and check if the values ​​match.

To test your monitor’s refresh rate, close all other browser tabs and all background processes, and then wait between 30 seconds and 1 minute. The test page will show your display refresh rate to a few decimal places. For the next step, round them up to three digits.

Using UFO Test to determine the true update rate

Installing and running Rivatuner

After installing Rivatuner, run the program with administrator rights. Then click on the green «Add» button in the lower left corner. Navigate to the folder where the desired game is installed. (Note that you can also set the options globally, but we prefer to set them individually for each game.)

Select the game executable and then add it to Rivatuner.

Adding a new game to RTSS

Calculating the frame cap

Take the refresh rate to three decimal places and subtract 0.01 from it. For example, if your refresh rate is 60.001, then the frame limit will be 59.991.

Select a game on the left side of the Rivatuner interface. Then enter a frame rate limit value in the box next to Frame rate limit. So we limited the frame rate of the game to a value below the refresh rate of the monitor. You may need to experiment a bit with this value. Some games are more sensitive to frame capping than others: if you notice a lot of judder, then try increasing the frame rate cap in 0.002 increments.

Enable vsync and launch

Launch the game and then enable vsync in its settings. If you can’t do this, then enable forced vsync at the driver level from the AMD or Nvidia control panel. That’s all!

After enabling vsync with low latency, you will get significantly better input lag without frame tearing. However, there are subtleties that are worth paying attention to. Low latency Vsync works best if your system is capable of sustainably running above your monitor’s frame rate. If it only reaches the 60 FPS mark, then enabling this feature may cause additional jerks when the frame rate decreases.

Scanline sync: An even more convenient alternative

If you don’t want to experiment with fractional frame rate limits, then RTSS has an alternative: scanline sync. Scanline sync allows you to control where on the screen frame breaks occur with vsync disabled.

How will this help? The frame break is displayed as a single line that we can move to the edge of the screen, to the very top or bottom, where it will essentially disappear. To enable scanline sync, you need to disable the frame rate limit by setting Framerate limit to 0 in RTSS and disabling in-game or driver vsync.

Now let’s decide where we want to place the scan line. You can experiment with this, but ideally you should take the vertical resolution of the monitor (1440 if it’s a 1440p monitor) and then subtract 10-20. Enter this number in the Scanline Sync field. S-Sync often provides even lower input latency than low latency vsync.

However, you will need a powerful system (or a game that is not very demanding) for optimal performance. In games where the GPU load is constantly above 80 percent, S-Sync does not have enough performance to hold the breakline in one place, which can cause significant stuttering.

Rule of thumb: use S-Sync for games that are not very demanding and can have average frame rates well above 60 FPS. Low latency Vsync should be used in games that run close to 60 FPS.

Trouble-Free Tuning

Some ways of tuning PC performance may have a placebo effect or overhead, such as resolution scaling.