Added protective technologies aimed to jam unsafe memory scanner of PunkBuster anticheat system and this way prevent this anticheat system from crashing graphics hardware when RivaTuner resides in memory.
Unfortunately new 1.7xx versions of PunkBuster client (debuted on 04.17.2007 with Battlefield 2142 client) caused major system stability issues in conjunction with wide range of applications accessing hardware via user mode MMIO address ranges.

Apart from scanning executable code new PunkBuster services also fully scan data memory ranges of each process, which is critically dangerous when it comes to applications accessing hardware registers via memory mapped I/O port user address ranges.

Unauthorized access to hardware mapped memory ranges performed by anticheat system's memory scanner may cause unpredictable results including hardware failures and freezing.
The problem is not specific to RivaTuner and also covers wide range of ATI and NVIDIA oriented diagnostic, overclocking and monitoring tools (e.g. ATITool, PowerStrip, HIS iTurbo etc) developed by third parties as well as by certified AIB/AIC partners.

The situation had been investigated with help of Battlefield 2142 gamers community and is fully documented in RivaTuner's support forums, however, many inexperienced gamers never visit forums or read documentation and still wrongly interpret these crashes as instability of third party tools including RivaTuner, hurting software reputation in different forums this way.

Unfortunately, the problem is still neither fixed nor documented by Evenbalance, furthermore, the situation got critically worse in the end on June 2007 when Evenbalance launched the same unsafe PunkBuster clients v1.7xx for America's Army, Call of duty, Call of duty 2, Enemy territory: Quake Wars, F.E.A.R etc.

Due to this sad reason I cannot longer wait for response and fix from Evenbalance and risk RivaTuner software reputation because of anticheat system issues. The following features are introduced and aimed to prevent RivaTuner from being improperly accessed by PunkBuster or any similar memory scanner:

* Process protection. Now RivaTuner reduces its own access privileges after startup to prevent simple user mode memory scanners from accessing RivaTuner's process virtual memory. This protective technique is enabled by default, but it can be disabled by setting ProtectProcess registry entry to 0.

* MMIO protection. Now RivaTuner hides MMIO range into kernel mode address space instead of user mode address space to prevent any other user mode application form accessing hardware improperly. This protective technique requires each graphics hardware access operation to be transferred via RivaTuner's kernel-mode driver, so it increases CPU performance hit caused by RivaTuner's background processes (e.g. hardware monitoring) with approximate factor of 3x - 5x. This protective technique is also enabled by default, but it can be disabled by setting ProtectMMIO registry entry to 0.

* Paged MMIO access mode. Now RivaTuner is able to use paged access to MMIO range, mapping only desired MMIO pages for access instead of mapping whole registers aperture. This mode is only available when MMIO protection mode is disabled. Paged acces mode can be activated by specifying power-of-two page size with MMIOPageSize registry entry.

Note: most of these protective techniques will be enabled by default until the problem is fixed in PunkBuster.
I realize that the protective techniques will cause side effects such as increased CPU load even to those who never play PunkBuster protected multiplayer games, but unfortunately I see no other ways of protecting software reputation against inexperienced gamers spreading rumors about RivaTuner instability.
It you don't play multiplayer PunkBuster protected games or if you're not affected by crashing caused by it then it is strongly recommended to disable all the protections mentioned above.

These protection mechanisms is starting to get really annoying! :mad:

What exactly is the purpose of Rivatuner again ?:wtf::wtf:

Pretty much everything!

argh.. no voltage options for the 1gb 2900, im getting desperate!!

2.02's seem to work with the latest stable Nvidia drivers for me. Is there any reason to go to this?

does it support enabling of crossfire?

Just joined this forum to give a big shout out to Tech Power up!

Thanks so much for the signed driver for Rivatuner 2.03!

I've been using Rivatuner for years and as a 64bit vista user this means a great deal to me.

Thank You!

rek :)

erocker2.02's seem to work with the latest stable Nvidia drivers for me. Is there any reason to go to this?

Let me check it out then I'll let you know.

Pretty much the same like the 2.02 version. Added a lot more tweaking and compatibility with newer drivers to the latest 163.44 and ATI ones. I felt a liltle more comfortable with 2.03 version since it didn't give me a compatibility-warning pop-up message after initializing my computer. Fan speed's still working like previous versions. I haven't messed around with the advanced tweaking, but I'd think they'll work better... I'll leave that to you if you wanna mess with it :D
By the way, I only have 1 gfx card so I don't know about SLI or X-FIRE. You can go through the History page to find out what did the author add support to this version.

I'm at 675/990 stable and cool right now! Dunno how much higher I want to take it?:D

erockerI'm at 675/990 stable and cool right now! Dunno how much higher I want to take it?:D

hah! can you skew the MEM up a liltle further? :D . Again, don't go find me if something ugly hugs you. :laugh: