HWiNFO and HWMonitor now report RTX 50 hotspot temperatures
RTSS dev explains how to enable it as well.
HWiNFO has added hotspot temperature reporting for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards. The update follows HWMonitor 1.65 , which recently became the first widely used monitoring tool to expose these readings on the Blackwell gaming series.
This means RTX 50 owners now have two third-party tools capable of displaying hotspot data that NVIDIA does not provide through its standard monitoring interface. However, HWiNFO developers found two possible temperature sensors and have not yet confirmed which one represents the GPU hotspot.
The current theory is that one sensor reports the GPU hotspot while the other may track the VRM hotspot. It is also unclear whether the GPU reading comes from the same type of sensor exposed on GeForce RTX 40 and older graphics cards.
Source: Overclock3D
Source: ben unikoshardware/Overclock3D
No Hot Spot for MSI Afterburner, but RTSS supports it
MSI Afterburner developer Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk explained that he cannot add RTX 50 hotspot monitoring directly to Afterburner for legal and marketing reasons. MSI Afterburner is official NVIDIA partner-branded software, so its monitoring features must rely on sensors exposed through NVIDIA’s supported NVAPI interfaces.
Due to some weird reasons NVIDIA still keeps VRAM/hotspot temperature monitoring interfaces for private internal NV software only, they are not open even to partners making NVIDIA bases graphics cards. Every single currently existing tool displaying VRAM/hotspot temperatgure on NVIDIA side rely on reverse engineered private NVAPI interfaces (or even direct GPU access in case of RTX 5000 cards), which doesn’t make green GPU vendor too happy.
— Unwinder
Source: Unwinder
RTX 50 hotspot data is hidden from NVAPI and can only be accessed through direct GPU register reads, while earlier hotspot and VRAM readings used reverse-engineered private interfaces. Unwinder can demonstrate this access through his independent RivaTuner Statistics Server project, but he cannot include an unofficial implementation in MSI Afterburner unless NVIDIA adds the sensor to its public API. Unwider strongly suggests that someone create a plugin that would allow for easy unofficial support.
NVIDIA stance uncertain
NVIDIA removed public hotspot reporting when the RTX 50 series launched, although its internal MODS diagnostic software can still access the sensor data. It appears that developers found a way to read this data without such tools.
Since this is not official sensor/API access, VideoCardz has reached out to NVIDIA for a statement . We asked whether the company plans to allow third-party tools to continue displaying this sensor data, whether future drivers could block access and whether NVIDIA will provide developers with proper documentation.
Source: Overclock3D , Unwinder
