is special k just not working properly because i have the gsync sign on the screen but in special k it says inactive thought frame splitting is enabled
is that a d3d12 game ? i’m guessing it is…
keep in mind that, for d3d12 games, special k uses something from the nvidia driver (nvapi) for initial detection of gsync on game launch AND also uses intel’s presentmon for status changes during the game
so, despite gsync actually being active, you may see sk’s gsync status indicator showing “supported + inactive” in a d3d12 game if your driver is having some issue and/or if your presentmon trace session is stuck or not available.
presentmon shows the presentation model that the game is running with. if you open the special k control panel menu (Ctrl + Shift + Backspace), you’d want to look for the section that says “hardware: independent flip” or “hardware composed: independent flip” (it should be above the frametime graph).
those are basically the good presentation models and the ones in which gsync/vrr can engage (even without the nvidia cp’s windowed gsync option – and i don’t recommend using the windowed gsync option by the way as it can cause gsync to be triggered in other apps and become problematic…)
if you see “presentation Model tracking unavailable” like this-
then you may have a stuck session or you have disabled the event trace sessions… someone in the Special K discord recently kept getting “presentation Model tracking unavailable” (and their gsync status indicator for d3d12 games kept showing “supported + inactive”)… and it turned out that they had gone out of their to disable event trace sessions because they thought it was good for minimizing extra things outside of the game…
if you’re blocking or disabling all event trace sessions somehow, like someone else did, re-enable them… and, if you’ve not gone of your way to block or disable the event trace sessions, then the presentmon trace session might have just gotten stock (i believe it could happen sometimes when multiple apps that make use of presentmon are open)
in the case where the presentmon trace session is stuck, you could open the performance monitor in windows after searching for it through windows’s search -
then go to data collector sets → event trace sessions
and find the one that says presentmon – if it’s started by Special K, it’ll normally be found as “SK_PresentMon [0]”
if you found the presentmon session there, right click it and stop it, and then delete it. special k would normally then start a new presentmon session the next time you launch a game with special k
however, if you see “presentation model unknown (full sk install is required)”
like this-
that basically means you don’t have the permissions for presentmon, and it says a full sk install is required because a full install of sk sets the permissions for presentmon for you.
doing a full sk install in this case involves running the special k installer (the latest installer can be found in the #installers channel in the special k discord server, or you can get the installer found here: https://discourse.differentk.fyi/t/download-special-k/1461 – which is often a few months older than the latest version from the discord). you might also need to restart your PC after that or log out and log back in.
if your sk control panel is already showing “hardware: independent flip” or “hardware composed: independent flip” but you still see “supported + inactive” reported by sk’s gsync status indicator, then typically the issue is with the driver/nvapi… and what typically fixes this situation is restarting the display driver.
you could restart the display driver from the special k injection frontend app here (click on the “restart display driver option” after right clicking on the MPOs area found at the bottom of SKIF’s settings page)-
that, or restarting your PC could fix the driver/nvapi issue…
edit: also sk’s gsync status indicator won’t work correctly with d3d12 games if you’re using some very old nvidia driver… i don’t know the exact minimum version needed, but probably some nvidia driver from early 2023 or newer…