Monday, February 4th 2019
ASUS GPU Tweak II Smears Ads Over Your Games
ASUS GPU Tweak II is a utility the company bundles with its graphics cards, which lets you overclock and monitor them. Among its many monitoring featuresis performance overlay mode, that adds an overlay to fullscreen 3D apps (in other words, games), which can be set to display parameters such as GPU temperatures, clock-speeds, frame-rates, etc. GPU Tweak II user "PurpleSquash640" on Reddit posted a screenshot of an ASUS banner ad overlaying their Battlefield V fullscreen.
This somewhat square banner is positioned at the right-center corner of the screen, with a handy "turn off this picture press ctrl+alt+F" text. When GPU Tweak II is closed (background process killed), the overlay disappears. The banner itself markets the company's latest RTX 20-series graphics cards. "PurpleSquash640" captioned this banner "wtf?" in their screenshot, and we can't disagree with that sentiment. This is the first among many questionable GPDR-teasing practices by ASUS in recent times, including unsolicited injection of files to Windows System32 folder by its latest motherboards.
Update 05/02: We have been informed that the "ad" doesn't appear by default, and is just a placeholder image for a different feature altogether. Apparently you can configure the GPU Tweak II OSD to display images (such as your clan logo). The app has a bundled placeholder image that looks like an ASUS banner ad.
Source:
PurpleSquash640 (Reddit)
This somewhat square banner is positioned at the right-center corner of the screen, with a handy "turn off this picture press ctrl+alt+F" text. When GPU Tweak II is closed (background process killed), the overlay disappears. The banner itself markets the company's latest RTX 20-series graphics cards. "PurpleSquash640" captioned this banner "wtf?" in their screenshot, and we can't disagree with that sentiment. This is the first among many questionable GPDR-teasing practices by ASUS in recent times, including unsolicited injection of files to Windows System32 folder by its latest motherboards.
40 Comments on ASUS GPU Tweak II Smears Ads Over Your Games
Give it few months / years and it will be the new norm.
I used it back in the day to set Fan Speed.
I am sticking with mid-range MSI gear moving forward, gpu and mobo is MSI for me, MSI also makes the best high end laptops, in my experience anyway of the last 2 years.
MSI mid range or high end is the only way to go these days imo
End Result: ASUS GPU Tweak II for fun and profit.
(new)ASUS PR team edited name: ASUS GPU Tweak II.
I never used asus tweak and i am sure as hell not gonna use it now. There are more than enoufh adds every where, i dont need adds pop up in my games as well.
One simple modern example are their B450 motherboards which buildzoid reviewed. You pay more, and get lower quality than, lets say, ASRock or MSI.
If they dont clean up their act ASRock will be my main board for my next upgrade.
For example:
Asus X99-A motherboard has a memory issue with G-Skill RAM listed as having been supported.
Asus P8P67 Pro motherboard had some SATA ports stop functioning. Keep in mind this was a motherboard that Asus immediately issued an RMA for (when it was new back in ~2011) due to an Intel flaw with the chipset. So at the time I RMAed a newly manufactured board for a new revision replacement that supposedly didn't have the same SATA Intel errata flaw.
Asus Z97-A motherboard had some SATA ports stop functioning as well.
So at this point I am ready to try some ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI boards.
As for the Asus ads, I'm actually OK with it provided that the video card is free. If it isnt free then I might be OK with it if Asus pays me to look at them occasionally. If not then WTF Asus!?!
Funny thing is as @ShurikN said, I've always had something not right with each product I've owned from Asus. Had:
- laptop from F3-series: literary the plastic fell apart. One hinge tore off
- motherboard on 775 socket: P5Q-EM didn't want to take AMD cards at all (blue screen of death) without a BIOS update. After the update it works fine with AMD cards
- two motherboards on Kaby Lake: Asus AI suite doing funny stuff to fans
- Asus ROG laptop, keyboard backlit went off after 1809 update on Win 10, but this could MSs fault
That's on top of my head, but still better than Gigabyte's fan mishap on my GTX 970 G1 Gaming....
Extra monetizing of their customers, not awesome...
Although not as bad the other vendors have app issues too. Fwiw the Gigabyte graphics tool (Aorus engine they call it) has been incredibly buggy for years. Thankfully, it doesn't stoop to this level of injecting on-screen ads. But it's had a world of bugs that are nearly as bad. One bug in it causes it while running to grab full-screen focus randomly, causing w/e game you are playing in full-screen to pop back to the desktop like you alt-tabbed, usually badly timed in the middle of action. Another problem is that it forces you to also into RGB fusion, which is Gigabyte's LED lighting app which is even more buggy.
So I think there's been a decline in the past 2-3 years in all of MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus. It's really to the point that you have to keep any vendor installed apps to an absolute minimum, and even then do restore points so you can go back if/when you find out they are buggy. Or if you do, stick to the ones that are proven to be fairly stable and malware free like EVGA or MSI Afterburner. Injecting overlay ads, or squeezing malware in bios so they are reloaded on fresh installs? Asus, I am disappointed. I would RMA (or ebay, if it's too late for that) that thing so fast it's not funny.
Yes, GPU Tweak II has that overlay feature. Yes, it has that particular advert as default picture. However the option is not enabled by default.