Hi,

Discussion and development surrounding Special K can now be found at https://discourse.differentk.fyi/

This move comes after the events of the last few weeks that saw Kaldaien’s accounts receive site-wide community bans preventing any interaction with Special K users, as well as Valve’s sudden decision to not allow Special K to be released on the platform. The two aforementioned events are unrelated to one another.

Here are a few expressive words from Kaldaien on the subject:

First the system-wide ban, then stabbed in the back by Valve, who already approved the use of screenshots with a mutual understanding that it was fair use. I cannot even get the application fee refunded, so it is going to be a bit rocky at first. I do not want to give up on my plans for Workshop integration, but that now falls on my shoulders to design, implement and get hosting to build my own workshop system independent from Valve.Any show of support would really cheer me up right now.

Discord
Forums
Wiki
Patreon

Regards,
Aemony of the SK team

Changed the icon used by SKIF, including the addition of a new icon for future system tray functionality.

It may take a while to get used to, but is not expected to change like this again ;)

• Fixed Windows key blocking behavior in games that use RawInput to poll the keyboard
  
• Fixed keyboard disconnect behavior in Resident Evil 3
  
• Added tooltip explaining the purpose of CPU core count spoofing to Framerate Limiter > Advanced

Disabled cloud sync for Special K's INI files because the Steam client is too darn slow; I will write my own system to do this more efficiently in the future.

Gamepad input is no longer processed while SKIF does not have keyboard input focus, and ImGui has been changed to invalidate its keyboard state when Alt-Tabbing.

• DPI Scaling is enabled by default
  
• Moved DPI Scaling and HDR settings to new Options menu
  
• Improved sub-pixel font precision in SKIF and Special K
  
• Text labels and icons are DPI scaled as a single entity
  
• Changing selected games properly centers mouse cursor over list item
  
• Added text prediction (select game by typing its name) to the status bar

• Improved performance of D3D11 Render Mod Toolkit in games with many RenderTargetViews
  
• Reduced state tracking overhead for "DisableIfTexture=..." D3D11 shader mods significantly
  
• Temporarily disabled support for modding D3D11 textures that use Staging uploads

• Engines that use Staging data uploads most often == Unreal + Unity.

• Gamepad Input Blocking properly queries and fills-in neutral/deadzone values for analog axes

• Prevents issues in DirectInput games where a game's menu constantly scrolls while SK's control panel is using the gamepad

• Found and killed Persona 4's crash handler so that Special K's can do something useful instead.
  
• Added Denuvo anti-debug workarounds for a number of NtDll and Kernel32 thread / handle APIs

• Much less of a hassle debugging broken Denuvo games during startup :)

Launch button in Game Management is properly aspect ratio corrected and centered at all DPI scales and changing DPI scale while SKIF is running is correctly handled.

Incorrect UI sizing issues may come up if you move the window between monitors with different DPI scales, or if you run at DPI scales > 200%.

Font scaling is not implemented correctly and text w/ DPI scaling enabled is blurrier than intended; you should use DPI Scaling only if your DPI scale is <= 150% or you are having trouble reading the UI at its native scale.

Added a predictive text input system to assist in selecting games quicker, type the first few letters of the game you're interested and then stop and it will find the closest match.

Also changed game sorting to match Steam's heuristics; case-insensitive, and "the" and "a" are ignored in game titles.

• Fixed false-positive shader resources showing up in D3D11 Render Mod Toolkit for many 32-bit games
  
• Added memory limit checks prior to taking enhanced screenshots in 32-bit D3D11 software
  
• Added Large Address Aware patch detection for Persona 4

1. HDR Widget now defaults to a swapchain with at least 4 backbuffers and 5 device latency for better frame pacing.
   
2. HDR Widget no longer overwrites existing swapchain tweaks, provided they satisfy 1)

• Eliminated games with unparsable appmanifest_<xyz>.acf files (partial / corrupted Steam installs) from game management UI

In order to reach a larger audience, Special K and all associated tools and DLLs will no longer be compiled targeting AVX CPU instructions. I still do not intend to support Windows 7, but will attempt to support users with pre-AVX CPUs.

Implemented flip model glitch recovery to eliminate microstutter in even the most stubborn engines (i.e. Tales of Vesperia). Many scenarios that used to require the framerate limiter be turned off and then back on to get a flat framepacing graph have been completely eliminated.

You should always turn Special K's framerate limiter on in D3D11 games for lowest input latency and smoothest frame pacing.


To get the most out of SK's framerate limiter, you need to use flip model. Refer to the following recommendations for best framerate limiter performance.

Recommended SwapChain Settings

[✔️] Use Flip Model Presentation Presentation Interval.: 1 (refresh) Backbuffer Count......: 4 (buffers) Max. Device Latency...: 5 (frames) [✔️] Waitable SwapChain Maximum Wait Period...: 200 (ms)

(*) Run all games in borderless window mode, Fullscreen is actually a performance bottleneck versus Flip Model w/ SK's limiter.

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In related news, Special K's limiter compared to the competition. Those results pre-date the advances made in 0.11.0.36, but show that Special K's framerate limiter was already leaps and bounds ahead of the alternatives.