Rivatuner OSD:How does it work ?

[wolf2009]

How does the rivatuner OSD work ? does it only show up when GPU is accessed ?

like it shows up in games, photoshop, adobe reader, and while playing a movie ?

or can it show up even when GPU is not used ?

 

[Kursah]

If it's like the EVGA Precision OSD which I would assume it is because before the Precision OSD Utility was available it was a Rivatuner extension that Precision was using.
As far as I know it's a simple Overlay program, things you can show are:

Pretty simple, shows any of the following that you want:
FPS (includes rendering method DX9 or DX10)
GPU Speed, Mem Speed, Shader Speed
GPU Temp

might be a couple I missed. I generally run temp and FPS.

It does show in screenshots from what I've seen, but at least on default is for games/3d apps only, i.e. say Left 4 Dead, or a game benchmark. Though with Vista x64 I've seen some interesting things, like not being able to use the Steam overlay (shift + tab iirc) when OSD is running. But aside from that it's really simple, I do like it better than the FRAPS FPS overlay for more general use and monitoring.

 

[wolf2009]

no i'm not asking how to get it working. that part i know.

I'm asking like does it intercept calls to GPU or DirectX from a particular soft and if the soft does so, it shows up in the soft ?

 

[Kursah]

Dunno, didn't program it.

I would assume it intercepts calls though, might be worth contacting the developer for that one.

 

[W1zzard]

it intercepts direct3d calls.

it injects a dll into every application that is started, hooks calls to direct3dcreate(), returns a modified interface that has more calls hooked. before the final present() call it draws some stuff on screen and calls the original present()