RivaTuner: the Utility for Overclocking Video Cards
RivaTuner is a program for overclocking NVIDIA and AMD video cards. Aleksei Nikolaychuk, who is also known under the nickname Unwinder, created the utility.
RivaTuner allows monitoring the temperature and frequency of the graphics core and memory and managing all the parameters of the video card. Cooler settings are provided such as turning on of the constant fan speed or determination of the number of resolutions in percentage depending on the load. In addition, there are monitor settings, i.e. brightness, contrast and gamma for each colour channel.
The main function of the program is overclocking the video card. It is possible to change the frequency of the core, memory and shading unit. The settings immediately come into operation. What’s more, it is possible to set the frequencies for 2D and 3D separately in order to reduce the load when working in low-resource applications.
The features of RivaTuner:
- supports multi-monitor or multi-display system;
- supports an LCD panel from gaming keyboard Logitech G15;
- a built-in registry editor is provided allowing changes in the registry settings on Windows;
- its hardware monitoring module is from GPU and chipsets producing heavyweights NVIDIA and ATI technologies;
- fan control can be regulated by the user;
- customizes with a local language;
- it is compatible with most series of Windows OS, including Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vistas, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. In addition, the RivaTuner utility also operates smoothly on any DirectX, Vulkan or OpenGL compatible graphics cards. The program is not for mobile solutions.
Two levels of modifying your graphics
The utility RivaTuner can perform operations in two modes and set your graphics at the driver level or low level. At the driver level the utility changes the settings with the help of the registry and directs to the functions of the driver to perform some operations such as updating an overlay context or changing a color scheme, etc.
Running this mode, it can also read some information directly from your graphics hardware. However, RivaTuner does not use a low-level access to your hardware to make any kind of changes. What concerns the low level, the utility operates directly with your graphics hardware. Making modifications in this mode the program does not use the display drivers at all and programs the graphics processor’s registers directly.
Download and installation
Due to the fact the last release of the utility took place in 2009; there is a necessity to MSI Afterburner. The reason is that RivaTurner doesn’t work well with the latest graphics cards. Having completed download of MSI Afterburner, it is necessary to select the RivaTuner Statistics Server along with MSI Afterburner when prompted to choose the components to install.
Then follow the same installation process for RTSS. Open MSI Afterburner and click on the settings. Go to the monitoring tab. There you see many options provided by MSI Afterburner to customize screen display. These include GPU temperature, GPU usage, Memory usage, Core clock, and so on. Save these setting in custom group names. It will open the RivaTuner Statistics Server application.
The last step is to change the font setting for the on-screen display. To do this you should click the Raster 3D tab. RivaTuner allows changing the color of the text, the size and location editing. All the selected modifications are visible while you are playing the game.