HWiNFO gains ability to monitor NVIDIA GPU hotspot temperatures

German tech writer Igor Wallossek got his hands on an unreleased beta version of HWiNFO that can monitor GPU hotspot temperature for NVIDIA video cards.

Up until now, it was not possible to develop tools to read out these values because NVIDIA did not provide the necessary documentation to developer. NVIDIA only provided a way to read out a single value that averages the results of all GPU temperature sensors. The newest version of HWiNFO makes it possible to monitor the hottest point of your GPU.

Igor's tests show, on an MSI RX 6800 XT Gaming X, a temperature delta of 12–20C between the average and the hotspot. Meanwhile, with the new unreleased beta, Igor found a temperature delta of between 11 and 14 degrees on an RTX 3090 Founders Edition. This might lead to the assumption that the Nvidia card has a better cooling solution, but we wouldn't jump to conclusions — how the average is calculated, the GPU topography, and the locations and quantity of thermal sensors are all bound to be different, so a direct comparison is not possible.

Reading out hotspot temperatures is already possible for AMD RDNA2 GPUs. It's unknown when the new HWiNFO version will hit the web. Also not known is which GPUs will be supported, we know at least the GA102-based GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 support it, but compatibility with other GPUs is still a question mark.

Via: Tom's Hardware