I would love to have HDR support in DX9 games, is this something that is planned? Or is it impossible to do with DX9 for some reason?
It is not possible. D3D9 does not support the image formats needed for HDR.
You can probably use an API translator (e.g. dgVoodoo2) to translate the game to D3D11 and then SK can add HDR from there.
Not the most, uh, professional download page you will ever come across, but this is the official dgVoodoo2 site:
2 Likes
“The site ahead may contain harmful programs”
lol no it doesn’t 
I think Google is just offended by the password.
The Vogons forum can also be pretty useful for dgvoodoo information including both the current versions and builds that are still a WIP plus compatibility and settings and yeah Google occasionally hits the file with a warning sometimes it’s something involved with it too and you get the whole safety thing through Google and that blocker screen.
https://www.vogons.org/viewforum.php?f=59
Which I suppose explains the password ha ha.
EDIT: Interesting to hear a D3D9->D3D11 wrap can also work for HDR functionality in older games, might be useful to remember although I don’t have that hardware myself but it’s neat to see that it has some alternative uses and can extend functionality in this way through SpecialK now operating under D3D11
Though as I can’t test it I’m just assuming it’ll work in general maybe with some game specific quirks because some PC ports can be kinda problematic or do some non-standard stuff and what not but hopefully it does work if D3D9 can’t do HDR in some other way. (Which I assume is API limited and not something Microsoft or the GPU vendors will try tackling in some forced method like desktop HDR into the game or whatever could be done.)
I can’t help but wonder if Dege have actually bothered sending the files in question to AVs and report them as false positives. I’ve only seen him complain about it and then take steps towards obfuscating the files (such as when he password protected them, which eventually led to the whole site causing a warning instead).
Back when Special K was maliciously reported as malware (must’ve been two years now, I think?), we simply went through the motions and reported them as false positives, and a day or two later the warnings was gone.
Some packages of Special K might still throw a warning, but in those cases its because Kaldaien bundled dgVoodoo’s control panel – which is what Google and AVs throw a jiffy about. It was removed soon enough from newer packages of Special K as a result.
Getting it code signed would hasten the process 
An OV signature would put most AV software at ease, and an EV signature would instantly shutup all browsers. Of course EV’s only for organizations.
Has anyone managed to get this to work in a DX9 game because I haven’t so far but I’m still testing.
Dgvoodoo2 or Special K with DgVoodoo 2?
I suggest using just Dgvoodoo2 on its own. If a game launches fine, then activate Special K injection. SK will tell you if the game is running in Dx11 mode.
Special K with DgVoodoo 2 + Working HDR retrofitting
That’s what I mean
What i’m asking is, are your issues due to Dgvoodoo2 or Special K? Need a more elaborate answer, i can only make guesses as to where your problem lies.
I know Dgvoodoo2 can crash a game at startup depending on the compatibility settings you’ve set for it
The issues you’re experiencing may be down to Dgvoodoo2, and nothing to do with Special K, which is why i suggest disabling Special K injection, while you find the right Dgvoodoo2 settings. Once a game works with Dgvoodoo2, then you can restart the game with Special K enabled. If a game crashes with Special K disabled, then you know your issue is isolated to Dgvoodoo2.
In Borderlands TPS for example I get a “Ran out of memory” crash with dgvoodoo2 & SK but I just wanted to know if somebody can actually confirm that you can use dgvoodoo2 with SK to have HDR in a DX9 game. 
I’m not able to check HDR but I’ve found that setting both d3d9 and d3d11 to true in the SK ini seemed to fix the UE3 memory issue for what I’ve tried.
[API.Hook]
ddraw=false
d3d8=false
d3d9=true
d3d9ex=false
d3d11=true
OpenGL=false
Make sure to use SpecialK.dxgi to force SK to apply to the translated D3D11 environment instead of the D3D9 environment that dgVoodoo2 is working on.
Thanks for the response! I didn’t realize that DX9 didn’t have support for HDR output at all, I thought that was more of a OS/hardware thing rather than an API thing.
I have tried dgVoodo2, but unfortunately, I have never actually gotten it to work. I move the DLL to the same location as the EXE file, but nothing happens and the game stays DX9. Not sure what i’m doing wrong there.
Do you mean to use the Specil K dll file and rename it to SpeialK.dxgi ?
No, create a file called SpecialK.dxgi in the same directory as the game.
The contents of said file do not matter, just the name.
That will explicitly tell global injection to treat all executables in the directory as D3D11 / D3D12 and ignore D3D9 / OpenGL / Vulkan. It also does away with the need to whitelist non-Steam games when you put this file in a directory.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. 