Often when playing a game, players would face random frame drops or stuttering without knowing why or what causes them. They could point to various plausible causes via self-troubleshooting and some may succeed in solving the problem, but others can take longer to pinpoint the actual underlying issue, not know where to start looking, or eventually even decide to reset their PC to save themselves the hassle when it could end up being a simple fix.
We wanted to change that, and it's why our team at Hone have decided to build our own Hardware Monitor widget.
What Is Hone Hardware Monitor?
Hone's Hardware Monitor is a widget that automatically starts tracking your game sessions in the background, giving you overviews and alerts on what it noticed during your session once you've closed your game.
Some of the values it would look out for would be:
- CPU & GPU temperatures, usages, thermal/power limits & clock speeds
- Framerate & sustained FPS and whether it matches your monitor's refresh rate
- RAM usage
- Storage drive health & space
- Running processes & background tasks
Hardware Monitor by design is meant to be non-intrusive to your gameplay, which is why if users have dual monitors, the widget will appear on their second screen by default. You can also minimize the widget in its own Settings tab and it'd still continue to work as normal.
We recommend all users to have it enabled when gaming to get a better understanding of what's causing a bottleneck in their performance.
How to Use Hardware Monitor:
When opening the app's Home page, either go to the navbar on the left or to the top right corner to open Hardware Widget. You can also press Alt + H to open the widget directly.
Next, Hone should open a separate window for the widget. You can toggle between Simple & Advanced modes depending on how much info you want to see out of your game session.
Moreover, you can go to the Settings at the top right to:
- Change Hardware Monitor's chart polling/metrics & how it behaves during sessions.
- Toggle alerts you want to see. (Bottlenecks, throttling or process usage)
- Modify warning thresholds to your liking. (Temperatures, usage & app/process count)
Afterwards, make sure that you launch a game that shows up on your Games Page, then play it as normal.
Once you've closed your game, a session report will pop up where you can view a detailed breakdown of your PC's performance while you were playing your game. Those include:
- How many Optimizations you've activated.
- Whether Game Mode was ON or OFF during your session.
- How many Game Tweaks you've used and which.
- Your Alert History
- Your performance statistics & breakdown
Alerts & Suggestions:
Alerts show up either during or after your game session, with a description for each one on what to look out for., and most suggestions our widget provides are features we already offer in-app.
Based on some of the alerts you receive, below is a list of suggestions you can follow to know where to start looking.
We do not guarantee or promise that any of these suggestions would completely fix or eliminate your exact issues, we instead suggest you to contact our support team via support@hone.gg to so we can better pinpoint the problem.
Moreover, don't enable optimizations that disable features you use on a daily basis. (OneDrive, Xbox, etc.)
| Alerts: | Enable Optimizations (Suggested): | Disable Optimizations (Suggested): |
|
CPU Overheating Cooling Issues Thermal Throttling |
|
|
| High CPU Load |
|
|
|
GPU Hot Spot Critical GPU Overheating GPU Power Limits Reached |
|
|
| VRAM Overheating |
|
|
| VRAM Running Low | Same Optimizations As VRAM Overheating |
|
| GPU Thermal Throttling |
|
N/A |
| High RAM Usage/Page File Activity |
|
|
| Low Disk Space |
|
|
| SSD Running Hot | N/A |
|
|
App Activity Background Load |
|
N/A |
Hardware Monitor Pointers:
Hardware Monitor helps narrow down the cause of your performance issues so you know where to look instead of guessing where the issue lies based off of assumptions.
However, it can not pinpoint what exactly caused the issue in the first place, you'll have to troubleshoot the source yourself based on what the widget has picked up from your game sessions.
It only helps diagnose issues that are strictly hardware-related, meaning it's no guarantee that Hone's Optimizations could cause or fix alerts that the widget points out, and a hardware upgrade is typically the best solution.
We still recommend you don't hesitate to contact our support team at support@hone.gg so we can help you out with said issues and further narrow them down.