ATI Tray Tools

ATI Tray Tools is the RivaTuner of the ATI / AMD graphic adapters. It's one of the best (if not the best) tweaking solutions for Radeon owners. This doesn't mean it's only overclocker oriented and it can be used by beginners too. It only requires that you install the video card's drivers and doesn't need the Catalyst Control Center in order to properly work.

In fact, you can successfully use ATI Tray Tools instead of CCC as it's much more lighter and powerful. Once installed, the application sits in the tray and provides a consistent right-click menu. Alongside the innovative 'Game Profiles', you can easily access the 3D, Hardware, Tweaks, Hot Keys, Plugins, Refresh Lock, Rotation or Video & Colors.

For every distinct game profile, you can select its specific 3D settings such as Anti Aliasing, Filter, Adaptive anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, Texture Preference, MipMap Detail Level or Wait for Vertical Sync. You can also perform tweaks related to various supported filtering optimizations or texture format, enable 'Temporal AA' or set the 'Texture LOD Adjustment'.

The Overclocking zone of the program displays the nominal as well as current GPU and memory values and allows you to alter the voltage and core / memory speed. For artifact testing purposes, you are given the chance to run a 3D renderer or a benchmark. The Fan tab section offers two control options for manual speed and automatic depending on temperature, while the 'Automatic Fan Control Table' makes setting the fan speed according to the temperature a breeze.

You can also tweak shaders to override pixel / vertex shader versions and optimize pixel shader code, opt to use geometry instancing or force mip-map filter. The Hyper Z compression mode is configurable by enabling the Fast Z Clear, Z Mask or Z Top. If you're looking for disabling the DMA Copy or Block Write and use WMV Acceleration, then the System tab section of the Standard Tweaks window is the right place for you.

For those of you that just can't keep themselves from going beyond the ordinary tweaking limits, the Advanced Registry Tweaks window accommodates a vast array of options like Advanced D3D / OGL Tweaks, CCC Mode Switch, Compatibility / Display / Video Tweaks, Multi Thread Support or New AA and AF Methods. The application also packs a fully customizable On Screen Display for important values such as GPU / Memory Clocks, Frames Per Second or FAN Duty Cycle.

Bottomline is that ATI Tray Tools is indeed a very helpful set of tools that can get the utmost of your Radeon video card and truly enhance the overall experience in applications that put it to work, whether the load is light or heavy. You are presented a nifty environment where you can put your tweaking skills to test and come up with ingenious game profiles and overall increased performance.