Getting the Most Out Of Your Hardware: Video Card Utility Roundup (Anandtech)

[Babrbarossa]

Anandtech has a look at all of the most popular in-house and 3rd party tweakers- their favorite is ATI Tray Tools which I've never tried, but I think I might now.

While both ATI and NVIDIA generally do good work with their bundled first-party utilities, ultimately it doesn't take much effort on our part to pick out areas where they fall short. These utilities are well suited for basic users but are lacking in features for advanced users who find these same utilities bundled with their enthusiast-class card(s). With a market explicitly focused on selling these high-end cards to the same people that are going to want to tweak them in ways well beyond the normal user, both parties could offer better software. Much of what's missing is already in the drivers in the first place, so it largely comes down to an issue of creating a (good) UI to access it.
Until that changes, we have seen several third-party tools that offer these missing features and controls, and often in a much smaller footprint than the first-party tools they augment or replace. It goes without saying that ATI, NVIDIA, and their customers are all getting a great deal out of these utilities as they're all free and more than likely have sold at least a few cards to customers that have purchased them based on what these third-party utilities could do. In lieu of truly spectacular utilities coming from the creators themselves, it's a bit strange to see the true jewels of the software needed to control such powerful hardware coming from a third party.

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