RivaTuner

RivaTuner is a freeware overclocking and hardware monitoring program that was first developed by Alexey Nicolaychuk in 1997 [1] for the NVIDIA video cards. It was a pioneering application that influenced (and in some cases was integrated into) the design of subsequent freeware graphics card overclocking and monitoring utilities. It supports nVidia GPUs from the Riva TNT to the GeForce 700 Series, and also has limited support for the ATI/AMD Radeon series of video cards from the Radeon 8500 and above.[2]

RivaTuner

RivaTuner main menu with ATI video card
Developer(s)	Alexey Nicolaychuk
Stable release	2.24c / August 23, 2009
Operating system	Microsoft Windows
Type	Windows Registry Tweaking
License	Freeware
Website	RivaTuner English Homepage and RivaTuner Russian Homepage (in Russian)

For users of supported GPUs, rivatuner is one of the most commonly used software tools for overclocking. It allows the user to perform driver-level Direct3D and OpenGL tweaking through a graphical interface and also enables low-level hardware monitoring. It supported NVIDIA drivers from versions Detonator 2.08 to the ForceWare versions released in 2009. RivaTuner currently works with Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 x32, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. It also works with the older Windows 98, 98 SE and ME, but without official support.

RivaTuner was last updated in 2009. It has since been licensed by computer hardware vendors and integrated into various overclocking utilities, including MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision X (prior to version 16), and ASUS GPU Tweak. In 2014, EVGA terminated its contract with Alexey and was subsequently discovered to have engaged in source code theft after releasing a clone of RivaTuner that was claimed to be an in-house design. The resulting community reaction caused EVGA to redesign its overclocking tool.[3][4]

Rivatuner Statistics Server (RTSS), which was initially a companion software to RivaTuner, has since evolved into a frame rate and hardware monitor that supports video capture and frame limiting. Unlike RivaTuner, RTSS continues to receive updates and, as of 2017, supports performance monitoring on the latest graphics cards and APIs. RTSS is bundled with MSI Afterburner, but MSI Afterburner does not require the installation of RTSS to function.