ATITOOL & artifact scanning... alternatives?

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Psychor

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 22, 2007
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I bought a PNY 8800 GTS G92 512mb card a little while back and soon after began playing around with overclocking it. I didn't have high hopes but was pleasantly surprised. Using the stock heatsink and fan (@ 50%) I was able to push the card quite far (~ +25% core/shader) with temps < 80C at load.

Of course I was concerned about stability and what not so I decided to test my settings with ATITOOL (the latest beta). A week or so later I've almost given up on ATITOOL. It's ability to detect artifacts seems completely inconsistent (have to love that slider). I'm just wondering if anyone else feels this way and what else is out there for artifact scanning.

I have no problems (lock ups, crashes, or visual distortion that I can see) running my card 24/7 at my overclocked settings with apps or games. I run 3DMark06, Crysis demo benchmark (med/high @ 1920x1200), Hellgate London (DX9, max settings @ 1920x1200), TF2 (max settings @ 19200x1200), etc. without ANY problems. However, according to ATITOOL one run it might tell me that I have an error and then one run report no errors but still show a single yellow pixel here and there (which seems to prompt people to cry instability).

Thanks.
 
I don't have any advice for another stress testing software. . .

I have actually not had any artifacts or errors in ATItool since I've so far pushed my 8800GTS 640 no higher than 648/972, but what I do know is that in game you are likely not to see the artifacts that ATItool will notice, and depending on the title, you may not load the GPU as heavily so that's another reason you may not see errors in game.

I for one would look at an error in ATItool as a sign to back off a little, even if in game I noticed no artifacts . . .but maybe I'm conservative and would rather run the card well within it's limits.
 
[sob story]
Funny this thread showing up. I just killed a GTX 30 mins ago doing stress testing at OC of 620/1007. No artifacts were detected.....but, the card died in about 5 mins of testing. That would be the first time in over 8 years I've killed anything...Sadly it was a GTX.:eek: Luckily, I'll just fall back on my GTS until some new generation cards come out. And it IS a bonefide good overclocker....

Suffice to say, my trust of ATItool has diminished. Although I'm pretty sure the card had some weakness. I don't think a normal card would have died like that. Either way, it's hard to swallow seeing $350 go out the window for no good reason.
[/sob story]
 
There just doesn't exist a single definite overclocking test tool. You have to test with a bunch of apps to truly determine a max overclock. ATI tool is very good for finding max core and shader overclocks, however, it's almost useless for mem and overall combined overclockability.

Battlefield 2142 is the best thing I've found for mem testing since it'll easily chew up 512mb of gcard ram and thus you'll see artifacting if anything fails.

That fur demo is known to get cards the hottest, it is also known for smoking cards as well (it was the last thing run for a number of people on the extremesystems forums). However, that's entirely due to inadequate cooling of the card's power mosfets.


So yeah, ATItool is good for core and shaders, but nothing beats playing some games for half an hour each to really test a OC.
 
spine said:
So yeah, ATItool is good for core and shaders, but nothing beats playing some games for half an hour each to really test a OC.
Click to expand...


Agreed. I find that Oblivion works very well for testing video mem (particularly if you have any texture packs installed)...it's pretty easy for that game to max out your video mem. But using a couple of games is a good barometer for measuring stability...in addition to ATITool for artifact scanning.
 
I really have to snicker when people recommend the Real Time High Range Dynamic Lighting demo... sure this was great for stress testing 4 years ago, but now? It will barely make any current generation GPU break a sweat.

Honestly if you have to run something else to check for artifacting (aside from ATITool) you're better off using one of the really intense recently released games. Top on the list right now would be Crysis or even Oblivion.

And as much as I hate to mention it, 3DMark 06 is still pretty stressful on your GPU. Especially the 'Deep Freeze' portion, it has a real knack for rooting out any instability with your GPU or GPU memory.

Just my $0.02 USD :D
 
Blue Falcon said:
I really have to snicker when people recommend the Real Time High Range Dynamic Lighting demo... sure this was great for stress testing 4 years ago, but now? It will barely make any current generation GPU break a sweat.
Click to expand...

Snicker all you like, but at 1600x1200 it heats up my card just as much as the fur demo does. And way more than 3dMark06.
 
HDR at high resolutions does heat things up quite a bit, and since most games use it now, it's still a nice test.

My advice though is that if your games run fine without any artifacts or freezing, that's all you should care about.
 
Forceman said:
Snicker all you like, but at 1600x1200 it heats up my card just as much as the fur demo does. And way more than 3dMark06.
Click to expand...
i do like running a big window of rthdrbl with max aa and af to heat up the gpu. It doesn't hit the hard drive every 60 seconds like 3dmark does, and it runs in a window, allowing monitoring apps and such to be run in the background.
 
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