# GPU-Z: A shortcoming I'd like to see addressed



## shiny_red_cobra (Sep 10, 2010)

Hi, I love GPU-Z, but why can't it tell me EXACTLY which video card I have? All it says is "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series". Not very helpful at all, I can get that useless information if I take a look in the Device Manager. On the other hand, CPU-Z correctly tells me that I have a Radeon 4870, which is actually the most important thing I want to know. Why can't GPU-Z do this? Why is it reading the useless stuff from the driver? I don't wanna have to look up device IDs on the internet to find out what card I have, I want GPU-Z to tell me directly!

I know I'm ranting, but why should I have to use a program other than GPU-Z to find out what GPU I have? It makes no sense, and I hope you'll understand my concern, Wizzard! Thanks for reading!


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## wolf (Sep 10, 2010)

shiny_red_cobra said:


> Hi, I love GPU-Z, but why can't it tell me EXACTLY which video card I have? All it says is "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series". Not very helpful at all, I can get that useless information if I take a look in the Device Manager. On the other hand, CPU-Z correctly tells me that I have a Radeon 4870, which is actually the most important thing I want to know. Why can't GPU-Z do this? Why is it reading the useless stuff from the driver? I don't wanna have to look up device IDs on the internet to find out what card I have, I want GPU-Z to tell me directly!
> 
> I know I'm ranting, but why should I have to use a program other than GPU-Z to find out what GPU I have? It makes no sense, and I hope you'll understand my concern, Wizzard! Thanks for reading!



I think it actually depends on the card, for isntance it will tell you your card is an 8800GTX, not just 8800 series, but like you GPU-Z tells me "Mobility 5600/5700 series" when mine is a Mobility 5650.

my guess is this is not W1zzard's fault and it is pulling that info from a specific place, common to all or most gfx hardware, and it gives the best compatibility.


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

the line of text comes indeed from the driver and ati has been slacking with putting proper names into the driver.

fixing it would mean manually figuring out and adding the text for the 700 nvidia devices, 600 ati devices and roughly 100 intel devices that gpuz knows of

any ideas how this could be accomplished ?

also sometimes the same device id shares multiple SKUs


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## kn00tcn (Sep 10, 2010)

> Primary Adapter
> Graphics Card Manufacturer	Built by ATI
> Graphics Chipset	ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
> Device ID	9441
> Vendor	1002



where does this part get read from in CCC?

or system information of windows lists it too...

this probably wont work, as in device manager i have '4870x2', so that must be what these 2 are listing...


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

> Primary Adapter
> Graphics Card Manufacturer Built by ATI
> Graphics Chipset ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
> Device ID 9441
> Vendor 1002



those 4 values are also available in gpuz


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

based on the data from the gpuz validation submissions, gpu-z has seen 13,489 different devices

what now ?


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

can't tag many of them without actually knowing which card it was

it might be possible to use the driver name as baseline value -> "ATI HD 4800 Series"
but then someone needs to know his card is a "HIS HD 4870 IceQ4+ Turbo 1 GB GDDR5"

and somehow everybody needs to stick to the correct format
and there should be some way to get errors fixed

just letting users enter the name on their own results in stuff like:


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## shiny_red_cobra (Sep 10, 2010)

Thanks for the replies Wizzard, I know it isn't an easy task to accomplish, you would probably need to have some sort of database in place to do this. But I'm wondering how CPU-Z knows which video card I have, do you think it has a database built-in? Anyway, thanks for looking into it, I'd love if this could be implemented one day!


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## pantherx12 (Sep 10, 2010)

You could use bandwidth information to decide what card from a series it is.

For example gpu-z will read 4800 series.

And then uses bandwidth( or fill rate what ever) to decide if the card is a 50 or 70.

Simply a case of giving the program a rough range for each card ( made up numbers here)

But 4850 could have 30-50 and 4870 could have 50-70 type thing.

I'm sure it would be easy for you to implement wizz, whilst it won't be 100% accurate it's better than a kick in the balls.


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

shiny: cpuz might have a database of gpu names, dunno really. yes a database is needed, but thats not the problem. the problem is how to populate it. obviously i'm not willing to spend the time to manually enter them. so some sort of community based approach is needed. problem is how. need to assume that people are idiots, without a clue who are evil and enter false information. figure out how to solve this and i'll immediately start implementing it

panther: for the case of those two cards it's quite easy to decide which is which. the problem is that as soon as such a feature is added it has to work for all cards. not just the 4800 series





thats what lets you uniquely identify different models. and i have all the identifiers for all recent cards (gpuz validations) but i dont know the exact "name" of all the cards. in my case someone would have to know "PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+" and enter that into some kind of database


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## cadaveca (Sep 10, 2010)

No offense guys, but you are asking W1zz to fix ATi's problems. And while W1zz is #1 in my books, I think you are asking a bit much.


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## W1zzard (Sep 10, 2010)

i have no problems doing somethign to adress the issue, but i don't see a good solution to the problem i described. if anyone can come up with something i'm definitely gonna work on it


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## cadaveca (Sep 10, 2010)

W1zzard said:


> i have no problems doing somethign to adress the issue, but i don't see a good solution to the problem i described. if anyone can come up with something i'm definitely gonna work on it



The only thing I see happening would be it ending up the same as the bios database. Someone would need to validate all the info...


I have 4830, 4850, 4870, 4890...all are recognized as 4800-series.

it's not that I doubt you could do it, I just don't think it's fair to ask you to undertake such a large task.


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## claylomax (Sep 10, 2010)

shiny_red_cobra said:


> Hi, I love GPU-Z, but why can't it tell me EXACTLY which video card I have? All it says is "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series". Not very helpful at all, I can get that useless information if I take a look in the Device Manager. On the other hand, CPU-Z correctly tells me that I have a Radeon 4870, which is actually the most important thing I want to know. Why can't GPU-Z do this? Why is it reading the useless stuff from the driver? I don't wanna have to look up device IDs on the internet to find out what card I have, I want GPU-Z to tell me directly!
> 
> I know I'm ranting, but why should I have to use a program other than GPU-Z to find out what GPU I have? It makes no sense, and I hope you'll understand my concern, Wizzard! Thanks for reading!



You don't know which card you have? Just open the side panel. Were you drunk when you built your PC?   PD: Just joking.


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## hat (Sep 10, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> You could use bandwidth information to decide what card from a series it is.
> 
> For example gpu-z will read 4800 series.
> 
> ...



If someone messes with thier memory clocks, that would get thrown off.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 10, 2010)

could you make a program or implement into GPU-Z the ability to probe and return those values?


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## Ev1LrYu (Nov 12, 2010)

hmmm.... the approach must indeed be community based. I'm thinking we could let users submit the device id's along with name of the card, then over time when enough submissions (*to be determined) have been filed you can just get the most common response.. like a select distinct + count thingy in sql... Kinda like a majority vote.


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