Wednesday, December 26th 2018

Version 4.6.0 Beta 10 of MSI Afterburner Introduces OC Scanner for Pascal

One of the runaway features for NVIDIA's latest RTX-20 series of graphics cards was the introduction of support for the OC Scanner feature - a program that automagically tests a range of frequencies on your NVIDIA graphics card and overclocks it to a deemed "stable" sweet-spot. This practically obviates the need for manual fine-tuning, though of course, the best results should always be found down that road - provided there's enough tinkering.

The latest version of MSI's Afterburner (v4.6.0 beta 10, available in the source link) now brings this functionality to Pascal-based graphics cards (besides some other features, such as voltage control, for Turing; check the entire release notes after the break). Have fun.
MSI AB v4.6.0 beta 10
  • Added NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture support:
  • Added voltage control for reference design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20×0 series graphics cards
  • Advanced GPU Boost control for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20×0 series graphics cards. Extended voltage/frequency curve editor on GeForce RTX 20×0 family graphics cards allows you to tune additional piecewise power/frequency floor and temperature/frequency floor curves. Control points on those new curves allow you to control GPU Boost power and thermal throttling algorithms more precisely than traditional power limit and thermal limit sliders
  • Hardware abstraction layer has been revamped to provide support for multiple independent fans per GPU due to introducing dual fan design on reference design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20×0 series graphics cards and due to introducing native dual fan control in NVAPI. Both fans of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20×0 can be monitored independently in hardware monitoring module now and can be controlled synchronically in manual mode
  • Added NVIDIA Scanner technology support
  • Added Monolithic Power Systems MP2884A and MP2888A voltage controllers support
  • Added core, memory, auxiliary PEXVDD and auxiliary 1V8 voltage control for custom design MSI RTX 2080Ti Lightning series graphics cards with MP2888A + MP2888A +uP1816 voltage regulators
  • Added VRM and VRM2 temperature monitoring for custom design MSI RTX 2080Ti Lightning series graphics cards
  • Improved hardware monitoring module:
  • Added thermal offset for CPU temperature monitoring on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X processors
  • Similar CPU temperatures are now cloned for all cores on AMD CPUs to provide more convenient and unified On-Screen Display layout between Intel and AMD CPUs
  • "Pagefile usage" graph in hardware monitoring module has been renamed to "Commit charge"
  • Added group operation notifier to the caption of active hardware monitoring graphs list in "Monitoring" tab in the application properties. The notifier is informing you that you can apply a setting to all or to multiple selected hardware monitoring graphs when you hold group operation key (i.e. crap or Ctrl) and hover mouse cursor over the setting that can be applied to multiple hardware monitoring graphs at once (e.g. "Show in On-Screen Display")
  • Added "Select by group" and "Select by type" commands to context menu of active hardware monitoring graphs list in "Monitoring" tab in the application properties. New commands allow selecting the graphs of exactly the same type (e.g. CPU1-CPU8 usage graphs on eight core CPU) or the graphs with the same OSD/LCD group name (for example, GPU clock, GPU power, GPU usage and the rest graphs with "GPU" group name). Such commands allow you to show similar items (e.g. all CPU usages) in On-Screen Display with a single click or rename a group for all child graphs in the single pass
  • Multi-group edit mode is automatically selected now for group name edit field when you enable "Override group name" option while holding Ctrl key. You may still manually toggle this mode with Ctrl+M hotkey anytime when editing the group name
  • On-Screen Display item type (i.e. text, graph or combination of both) is now displayed in "Properties" column of active hardware monitoring graphs list in "Monitoring" tab in the application properties
  • Added programmable hotkey for clearing monitoring history
  • Added "Apply" button to application properties window. Now you may iteratively customize monitoring module without closing the properties to see the result on each step. Please take a note that some properties (e.g. application language) cannot be applied until you completely close properties window by design of application
  • Improved On-Screen Display layout editor:
  • System reserved variable slots 250-255 are now displayed as system variables in the layout editor
  • Added embedded graphs support. Embedded graphs can be displayed directly in the text in a separate column, it can be convenient for displaying per-core CPU usages
  • Added embedded graph width adjustment variable to the "Graph" property node
  • Added new "Graph placement" property node. You can use it to place each graph on top of text, on bottom or make it embedded in in text column
  • Added new variables to "Separators" property node. Now you may define independent separators for the graphs located on top of text part, for the text part and for the graphs located on bottom of text part.
  • Slightly altered interpretation of prolog and epilog separators. Please take a note that prolog separator is no longer automatically appended with new line symbol, so you must specify it manually when necessary and epilog separator is now displayed below the bottom group of graphs
  • The list of hardware monitoring items in "Add item(s)" dialog window is alphabetically sorted now
  • Added macroses for embedding any data from monitoring module into OSD text (e.g. prolog). You may use macroses to display anything available in the monitoring module, e.g. %CPU temperature%
  • Improved On-Screen Display hypertext formatting performance due to more optimal macro replace strategy
  • Revamped "modern web" layout. New layout is demonstrating new text formatting features including big custom framerate counter, custom embedded background and On-Screed Display header, custom benchmark and system time indicators and embedded CPU and GPU usage graphs
  • On-Screen Display layouts are saved in monitoring profiles now
  • Improved HwInfo plugin:
  • Added UPS load, power, input voltage and charge level data sources to default plugin configuration
  • ·mproved voltage/frequency editor:
  • Voltage/frequency editor window is now available on AMD GPUs. On AMD platform it allows you to edit core frequencies and voltages independently per each P-State:
  • Similar to NVIDIA GPUs, you may either adjust each point frequency or voltage independently with both mouse and keyboard or hold Shift and drag single point to apply similar frequency or voltage offset to all P-states
  • Read only P-States are currently not tracked, which means that you can try to adjust the frequency and voltage for it but it will be ignored when applying the curve
  • P-States locking functionality is not implemented yet
  • Slightly increased default voltage range for voltage/frequency curve. Now you may lock voltage to lower values if you're using voltage/frequency editor to downvolt and reduce power consumption on your NVIDIA GPU. Power users may customize the range further, the voltage and frequency limits are fully adjustable via the configuration file
  • Now you may press F5 key in the editor window to reread the curve from hardware. This feature can be useful when adjusting the curve in changing thermal environment
  • Voltage and frequency axes are dynamically scales now, so the captions do not overlap when window is too small
  • Improved hardware control shared memory interface. During the past years, external applications like MSI Remote Server were using this interface for tuning GPU hardware settings remotely from external applications. The improvements are intended to allow connecting external stress testing and automatic overclocking related applications to MSI Afterburner via this interface:
  • Now voltage/frequency curve on NVIDIA Pascal and newer NVIDIA GPU architectures is accessible via hardware control shared memory interface
  • New hardware control shared memory interface command allows MSI Afterburner to load hardware settings from external application without immediately applying new settings to GPU
  • Added notification message, allowing external applications to notify MSI Afterburner about new command written to hardware control shared memory. Without the notification, MSI Afterburner is executing external commands on each hardware polling iteration like before. Please refer to SDK and MACMSharedMemorySample source code to see notification message usage example
  • Added hardware identification info to GPU entries in hardware control shared memory. Hardware identification info allows external applications to reconcile own enumerated devices with logical GPUs enumerated by MSI Afterburner
  • Now hardware control shared memory is refreshed on delayed fan speed readback events
  • New bundled MSI Overclocking Scanner application in now included in MSI Afterburner distributive:
  • MSI Overclocking Scanner is currently supported on NVIDIA GTX 10×0 and NVIDIA RTX 20×0 series graphics cards under 64-bit operating systems only. On such systems you may activate the scanner with dedicated button from the main application window or directly from voltage/frequency curve editor window
  • MSI Overclocking Scanner is powered by NVIDIA Scanner technology, which is using proprietary algorithms to quickly and reliably test manually overclocked GPU stability or find the maximum stable GPU overclocking in automatic mode with a single click. The scanner is using embedded NVIDIA test load to stress GPU. The scanner provides you two functional modes:
  • In test mode MSI Overclocking Scanner is stress-testing your manual GPU overclocking settings during approximately 5 minutes. The result is returned as GPU stability confidence level (0% - unstable, 100% - stable)
  • In scan mode MSI Overclocking Scanner is stress-testing and slowly increasing clocks on voltage/frequency curve points and this way automatically detecting the maximum stable GPU overclocking. The result is returned as modified voltage/frequency curve and average GPU overclocking in MHz
  • Added framerate limiter compatibility settings group to "On-Screen Display" tab to the application properties. The settings include programmable hotkeys for globally disabling, enabling or toggling framerate limiting techniques of RivaTuner Statistics Server. The settings are intended to provide a way to dynamically enable or disable scanline sync technology based framerate limiting without altering application profiles, however you may use it to toggle traditional framerate limiter as well
  • Fixed kernel mode hardware access interface fix for AMD Vega GPUs. HBM temperature, GPU power and GPU voltage are no longer returning bogus values when kernel mode hardware access interface is enabled on AMD Vega series graphics cards
  • Hardcoded voltage/frequency curve clock multiplier implementation has been replaced with heuristic multiplier detection in order to provide unified voltage/frequency curve control implementation for NVIDIA Pascal and newer NVIDIA GPU architectures
  • Improved real-time voltage/frequency curve editor GUI scaling. Now GUI is scaled property when adjusting skin scaling with open voltage/frequency curve editor window
  • Improved report window, fan curve editor window, monitoring window and voltage/frequency curve editor scaling for scaling ratios greater than 100%
  • Multilanguage user interface library is DPI aware now. Main window skinned interface is no longer being scaled by OS and no longer looks blurred by default when greater than 100% DPI is selected. Now main skinned window interface can be manually zoomed with skin scaling slider in "User interface" tab, and the properties are automatically scaled by OS according to selected DPI
  • Added new skin scaling mode for power users. New mode provides better scaling performance at the expense of some scaling image quality loss
  • Skin scaling implementation is now asynchronous, so increasing skin scaling ratio doesn't increase GUI update time and doesn't decrease GUI response time
  • Skin scaling slider range has been extended from 75%-150% to 75%-200%
  • RivaTuner Statistics Server has been upgraded to v7.2.1
Sources: WCCFTech, Afterburner 4.6.0 beta 10 Download
Add your own comment

57 Comments on Version 4.6.0 Beta 10 of MSI Afterburner Introduces OC Scanner for Pascal

#1
xkm1948
Damn nice! I always had locking up issues when using v9 of Nvidia scanner.
Posted on Reply
#3
Raevenlord
News Editor
cellar doorThe download link is broken guys.
Delete everything behind msi-afterburner. on the resulting web page for the download.
Posted on Reply
#5
Durvelle27
I like these new scanners as they actually work pretty well

I use the EVGA Precison X1 tool and with the scanner managed to hit 2070MHz on the core from the stock 1410MHz and I like it also tests the OC as well for stability
Posted on Reply
#6
EarthDog
About time, msi!!!!
xkm1948Damn nice! I always had locking up issues when using v9 of Nvidia scanner.
???? Scanner is the same...it just found its way into MSI AB. The b10 name is for AB, not the version of scanning software. ;)
Posted on Reply
#7
xkm1948
EarthDogAbout time, msi!!!!


???? Scanner is the same...it just found its way into MSI AB. The b10 name is for AB, not the version of scanning software. ;)
Or to word my previous sentence better: V9 of scanner application with AB had hang-up issues during scanning for my Evga XC card. X1 scanning worked fine but I don't like its buggy fan control. Will give this a try after getting off work later today.
Posted on Reply
#8
EarthDog
Scanner was not a part of msi ab until just now in 4.6 b10.

In the other thread you were using 4.5.
Posted on Reply
#9
xkm1948
EarthDogScanner was not a part of msi ab until just now in 4.6 b10.
So you had no idea? I have been using AB Beta 9 for Turning scanner overclock for several months now.

www.guru3d.com/files-details/msi-afterburner-beta-download.html


MSI Afterburner v4.6.0 beta 9 (build 13319)
  • Added NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture support:
    • Added voltage control for reference design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20x0 series graphics cards
    • Advanced GPU Boost control for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20x0 series graphics cards. Extended voltage/frequency curve editor on GeForce RTX 20x0 family graphics cards allows you to tune additional piecewise power/frequency floor and temperature/frequency floor curves. Control points on those new curves allow you to control GPU Boost power and thermal throttling algorithms more precisely than traditional power limit and thermal limit sliders
    • Hardware abstraction layer has been revamped to provide support for multiple independent fans per GPU due to introducing dual fan design on reference design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20x0 series graphics cards and due to introducing native dual fan control in NVAPI. Both fans of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20x0 can be monitored independently in hardware monitoring module now and can be controlled synchronically in manual mode
    • Added NVIDIA Scanner technology support
    • Improved hardware monitoring module:
    • Added thermal offset for CPU temperature monitoring on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X processors
    • “Pagefile usage” graph in hardware monitoring module has been renamed to “Commit charge”
I
Posted on Reply
#10
EarthDog
Apparently not.

And neither does the writer who posted this... look at the title. ;)

Edit: omg..... I see where I went wrong.. support for PASCAL. Hahahahaha. I'm going to grab some coffee.


It is ironic though you said you dont use beta and yet this rolled off your tongue...hahalol
Posted on Reply
#11
xkm1948
EarthDogApparently not.

And neither does the writer who posted this... look at the title. ;)

Edit: omg..... I see where I went wrong.. support for PASCAL. Hahahahaha. I'm going to grab some coffee.


It is ironic though you said you dont use beta and yet this rolled off your tongue...hahalol
Yeah looks like you need A LOT OF coffee.

AB scanner implementation was not as good as X1. But AB's fan control is definitely better than X1. As I can't get the damn X1 to remember my fan curve after reboot no matter what I do.


At the same time I do wonder whether AB can implenment something similar on the AMD GPU as well.
Posted on Reply
#12
EarthDog
Zero issues here with my 2080ti fe and fan control. :)
Posted on Reply
#13
Vya Domus
Tried it, very conservative, you'd be better served doing it manually.
Posted on Reply
#14
xkm1948
Wait who said I am using 4.5?? I have been using AB 4.6 beta 9 for a long time.
Posted on Reply
#15
EarthDog
Maybe I confused you with someone else in another thread?

Edit: it was knoxx....lol....come on caffeine. Sorry!
Posted on Reply
#17
xkm1948
EarthDogMaybe I confused you with someone else in another thread?

Edit: it was knoxx....lol....come on caffeine. Sorry!
Oh man sounds like you need some serious rest instead of coffee o_O , I sincerely wish you are not working on some life-dependent work today.
Posted on Reply
#18
TheDeeGee
Shame you need the garbage UI to get to the option.
Posted on Reply
#19
nico_80)
I try and keep getting this... error 3 thing.
Posted on Reply
#21
Burned
I wish I could use this on my EVGA 1080FTW2, but it can't manage the stupid secondary fan controller.
Posted on Reply
#22
xkm1948
Happy to report back the new scanner API implementation is a lot more stable comparing to V9 beta of AB. The scanning actually took less time as well comparing to older scanner API. The final V/F curve is less aggressive comparing to previous API, in which I consistently getting +172 core. Now it is just +137 core. Still the performance using V/F curve overclocking is better comparing to manual overclocking at same target speed, probably due to V/F curve OC smooth out the downclocking once power limit is hit.

Overall good MSI update.

Posted on Reply
#23
Hockster
I can open the editor window, but clicking the OC Scanner button does nothing.
Posted on Reply
#24
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
xkm1948Happy to report back the new scanner API implementation is a lot more stable comparing to V9 beta of AB. The scanning actually took less time as well comparing to older scanner API. The final V/F curve is less aggressive comparing to previous API, in which I consistently getting +172 core. Now it is just +137 core. Still the performance using V/F curve overclocking is better comparing to manual overclocking at same target speed, probably due to V/F curve OC smooth out the downclocking once power limit is hit.

Overall good MSI update.

how did you bring up the curve editor?
Posted on Reply
#25
xpredator_13
Should I leave the fan curve be controlled by the OC Scanner? It sets my fan curve to AUTO...if I click the manual curve option, it ramp ups my fan speed...shouldn't this be at 100% when scanning? I mean, thermals can affect the total boost to nvidia cards...
Posted on Reply
Add your own comment
Apr 27th, 2024 02:29 EDT change timezone

New Forum Posts

Popular Reviews

Controversial News Posts