Rivatuner contest 2006

As you all know Rivatuner is one of the most loved and respected NVIDIA/ATI graphics card tweaking tools available on the face of this earth and ever since the very beginning Guru3D have taken this tool under it's wings.

Since 2002 we started counting the number of downloads of Rivatuner and it is with great pride that I can announce that at the verge of a new year and merged together with the final release of Rivatuner 2.0 we have now passed no less than an extraordinary five million downloads of this brilliant application.

Version 2.0 has become final, and 5 million downloads have taken place ever since 2002. You know what ? I feel a contest coming up.

In collaboration with JetWay and the DollarShop.nl we have organized a little contest with a really cool prize.

What can you win ?:

Two Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro cards for some Crossfire lovin !

Jetway Radeon X1950Pro with 575MHz core clock and 256MB DDR3 1380MHz memory

What do you need to do ?

Simple .. answer this question:

Question: When was the first public beta version of RT released ?

You must enter this with month/day/year precision (xx.xx.200x), this answer can easily be found. Submit your answer towards: rt-contest@guru3d.com

How does it work ?

Guru3D will collect all submitted results. Say we have 1500 proper results then we select these and sort them in chonological order.

Then we draw a random number between 1 and 1500. That number will correspond with the email sorted chronological.

Rules:

All entries must be in by December 31
Guru3D staff members are excluded from this contest
Your email address will be used solely for this contest. After the contest closes all email addresses will be deleted.
You must insert your full name + address + country in the email
There will be no dialog

The winner will be announced on the Guru3D.com FrontPage on January the 1st 2007.

Massive thanks go out the DollarShop and Jetway for their support in hardware for this contest.

Good luck and God Speed to ya !

We end this final release with some words from the programmer of RivaTuner.

"Almost 9 years past since the day when I realized that I'm not satisfied with the possibilities of my Riva 128 driver's control panel. RivaTuner was the first name that came into my mind that day together with the idea of writing a tool of my dream. This way RivaTuner, my primary hobby of the past years, was born. I lived completely offline that time and was not even thinking about making it public, so the utility resided just on my home PC during almost two years. But one day magic word "Internet" came into my life, drastically changed my lifestyle and gave me the ability of exchanging experience with the same enthusiasts like me. During discussing graphics hardware in one of the forums I suddenly mentioned some of the tweaks I did with my own tool, and I was surprised to see that these things are completely new for the people there. So I decided to share my hobby and results of my findings with the community and started writing special public version of tool, which was called RivaTuner v2.0.

I've sent the first beta version of the tool to a few graphics hardware related websites where it was published and soon have been contacted by Hilbert Hagedoorn of the Guru of 3D and gladly accepted his kind offer to make this place official RivaTuner's homepage. A few days later we announced it for you here at the Guru of 3D. So the second public part of RivaTuner's life started. During subsequent 7 years the utility was publicly updated more than 40 times, more than 200 private builds were tested by approximately 70 beta-testers. More than 10 helper tools were designed and developed special to assist RivaTuner development, total size of source code backups and reverse engineered code overcame 20 gigabytes.

But all these numbers are in the past now, RivaTuner development cycle came to the end and we're glad to present you the final release of RivaTuner v2.0. In the end of this long way I'd like to thank everybody who ever contributed this project development anywise. Thanks goes to beta testers team for trying to make public releases as trouble free as it is possible. You perfectly did your job, guys, and I thank your for that. Thanks goes to Hilbert Hagedoorn for hosting RivaTuner here and providing RivaTuner's discussion forums. Thanks goes to Andrew Worobiew, Hilbert Hagedoorn, Patrick Kan and people from NVIDIA, ATI, HIS, Sapphire and Forsa for assisting project development, giving the feedback and providing hardware for testing and development.

Without you I won't ever be able to support so many different display adapters. Big thanks goes to great professionals and authors of many competing hardware tuning related products, which I met during these years: Johannes Tuemler / GTU, Ashley Saldanha / PowerStrip, Arne Seifert / aTuner, Tamas Miklos / Everest, W1zzard / ATITool, Eugene Azarov / RaBiT and many others. It was the real honor to cooperate with you, guys, and I enjoyed it. Thanks to my wife Olga for allowing me to have such a nice hobby and tolerating my "just a second, honey, I'll just finish examining new GPU" during so many years. And of course my greatest thanks goes to you, thousands of RivaTuner fans I met every day during supporting the project in www.guru3d.com, www.nvnews.net, www.rage3d.com, www.beyond3d.com, www.ixbt.com, www.overclockers.ru, www.nvworld.ru, www.radeon.ru and many other forums. Thank your for your suggestions, for your feedback, for your kind words, for your moral support and the most important for your wish to learn something new.

One of the tasks I put in front of myself during developing RivaTuner was getting over my own knowledge limits with each new release, finding something undocumented inside hardware and drivers, sharing it with you and teaching you to do the same yourself. And seeing like many of you were able to progress from rookies to experienced users with much deeper understanding of graphics hardware and software internals, I'm just happy and feel that I've not wasted these years. Talking about the future of project and answering your "How final is final?" question, I cannot give you any promises right now. Currently I'm going to have a good rest, take a break and quit the development and support forums for a few months. Anyway, I hope that one day we'll meet again.

Thank you for paying your attention to the utility during all these years, RivaTuner simply won't be able exist so long without your interest to the project and without your trust in it. I hope you enjoyed using it as much as I enjoyed creating it. I wish you happy New Year and good luck in the contest!"