WattmanGTK Is A Simple GUI For Radeon Power/Performance Knobs On Linux

[ms178]

Can't confirm this with suspend to RAM on Windows.

It is definetly reproduceable on my machine: P6TWS with X58 chipset, MSI RX570 Armor 8GB, 24 GB DDR3-ECC-RAM, Windows 10 latest Insider Preview with a custom Wattman profile with manual voltage settings for undervolting my card. These get reset after a suspend/resume cycle to its default values and cannot be changed during that session anymore. A reboot reapplies my profile values.

[ms178]

In Windows, the driver makes a bios check for some Polaris cards (namely RX4xx series) that prevents the use of an edited bios without first patching the driver. Is this also the case with the open source drivers (I have not bothered testing it myself yet)?

I cannot give a definitive answer for Linux yet, as I don't remember if I was on the default VBIOS or not as I tried out Ubuntu 18.10 - it worked fine there but I didn't test any games. In Windows it is as you said yourself, also with my RX570 VBIOS, I need to patch the driver to use that card there.

[cb88]

Well, he used GTK sooo.... I sure do appreciate this app,but GTK? Really? You made a stupidly -fugly- app.

Indeed, if it was gonna be ugly I'd rather have had a FLTK app, at least it would be fast with few deps.

At least that would be lightweight C++ instead of hacky C as well. There are some decent looking FLTK apps also as you can use SVG to design UI elements like guages etc...

[ssokolow]

Indeed, if it was gonna be ugly I'd rather have had a FLTK app, at least it would be fast with few deps.

At least that would be lightweight C++ instead of hacky C as well. There are some decent looking FLTK apps also as you can use SVG to design UI elements like guages etc...

To be honest, the biggest problems I see have nothing to do with toolkit chosen. I've seen the same design problems in emulator fromtends written against the Win32 API, a Java-based DOSBox frontend named DBGL, GTK+ 1.2-based and 2.0-based emulator launchers, etc.

Examples include:

1. That graph along the top (which I assume to be a timeline) needs units on its axes and a legend.
   1. Disambiguate the lines by color-coding them and then make it color-blindness-friendly by putting a uniquely-shaped dot at each data point (eg. triangles for GPU clock, circles for fan RPM, squares for temperature, + for power.)
      1. They don't need to remain consistent as users check and uncheck data types as long as there's a legend, but it's a good idea to only allow changes of meanings for ones which are not currently in use. (ie. You uncheck the column that's using triangles and that symbol is now free to be reassigned.)
   2. To account for multiple scales with wildly divergent ranges (eg. MHz vs. °C) which can't be compared on absolute values anyway, put one scale on the left edge of the graph and one on the right.
   3. To allow more than two types of data, share scales when feasible. (eg. MHz/RPM on the left, °C on the rght.)
      1. Again, label the scales. You could also color-code each label's text and put the corresponding symbol next to it.
   4. Make the data point icons (circles/squares/triangles/etc.) cursor-hover targets so users can see the absolute value at any point in a tooltip. For extra utility, display all values collected at that instant in the same tooltip.
2. I've never used a GPU tuning control panel, so I don't know which details and relationships to emphasize and which would be a misleading false equivalency, but I feel like at least some (possibly all) of the lower sections could do well if collapsed into an editable version of my proposal for the graph along the top, where the user can drag the data points on the lines to edit settings or click on them to pop up a "type an absolute value" popup. (The current state could be represented by highlighting the relevant column in some manner.)
   1. There'd need to be some intuitive means for being able to select the desired data point when some are overlapping. Worst case scenario, have clicking on overlapping data points pop up a "type an absolute value" popup which contains fields for all overlapping data points, so you can type your way out of the overlap and then grab the one you want.

In the end, the key to good design for data-heavy interfaces like these is making sure you have a firm grasp on the relative importance of various details and their relationships, then thinking about the best way to visualize those things, and only then deciding how to translate it into widgets. The existing design looks like it's a "let the widget palette drive the brainstorming" approach, which is backwards when you're dealing with this sort of UI. (The most obvious indicator is how primitively it focuses on the relationships between the pieces of data as valuable information in their own right.)

A lot of the principles involved in designing to show off data well are the kinds of "chart design" things that don't get covered when talking about UI design, so I'd suggest checking your local library for the following two books as a good way to get up to speed. (They're also just plain engaging reads):

• How to Lie with Statistics [2] [3] by Darrell Huff (142-page pocket book)
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [2] by Edward R. Tufte (This is the "Kernighan & Ritchie C Book" of chart and infographic design.)

(All links are to WorldCat entries, since WorldCat puts "find a copy in your local library" and AbeBooks, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble links with price-check on the same page.)

[RavFX]

I use SRBpolaris (attention, lot of fake or modified version to steal your precious cryptocorn). That one allow edit of voltage range for adult, ie: I set mine at 1.35v and polaris bios editor limit to 1.1 lolvolt.

For people asking, there is no check for modified bios on linux (at lease on the oss driver)

[torsionbar28]

all your cryptocorn are belong to us!