Horizon: Zero Dawn

Can you verify that \Documents\My Mods\SpecialK\Global\whitelist.ini actually exists and includes Horizon Zero Dawn on its own line?

Edit: Also be sure to stop/start the global injection after having modified that file.

Global Injection into non-Steam games has no way of getting a human readable name for the game.

Your game profile directory will be Documents\My Mods\SpecialK\Profiles\HorizonZeroDawn.exe\

Restarting is not needed, since 0.11.0.30 or so, whitelist.ini and blacklist.ini are watched for changes and the injection service reloads them any time they are changed.

Whitelist exists, it has the entries. No profile for HZD was made. I’ve restarted injection every time. https://i.imgur.com/1sML2EG.png https://i.imgur.com/yBLX98n.png

I’ll just accept that this thing doesn’t like HZD. I tried another game (stardew) and it injected (though it also crashed).

Thanks for clarifying this, I was wondering because I also capped max FPS to my monitor (144hz) and no matter what I tried, my FPS graph lines were NEVER as straight as that image you posted above, so I am still wondering why that happened; I tried EVERYTHING (Full screen, borderless, vsyncs on/off every place possible…everything).
But the graph is just all over the place.
Moreover, the funny thing is that the higher I put FPS cap (say I use SK’s macros 36 - 48 - 72 - 144 and run a benchmark on each), the line actually gets flatter when I run the 144 cap bench, and CPU GPU highs are actually lower. Here is an image of what I mean:
https://imgur.com/a/JIvvZzF
Maybe Kaldaien would know why.
It seems the lines “flattenning” is just a result of the 144fps cap high being lower (82)…so that’s the weird part.

The game’s benchmark is completely useless. It is streaming assets constantly at a rate that is no way similar to actual gameplay. The only thing it’s doing is basically measuring your hardware’s performance; useful if you’re a review site comparing hardware, useless if you have a game you want to play and you’re trying to reduce stutter.

If you want a repeatable test that’s more inline with actual gameplay, you might want to use one of the game’s cutscenes.

1 Like

Did you create a empty file called SpecialK.dxgi in the folder with the HorizonZeroDawn.exe? I did it and after that the MyMods folder was created.

That’s a good point… that’s the other way of whitelisting games :slight_smile:

That will treat all executables in the directory as using DXGI and being whitelisted. I forgot about that, and I wrote the software. This software’s too complicated for one person :stuck_out_tongue:

Ughh… even I did not think about that approach…

Too much focus on whitelist.ini nowadays.

Just tried SpecialK.dxgi, also didn’t work unfortunately.

The ■■■■? Are you running the game as an administrator or something? That’s like the only reason left that I can imagine might prevent Special K’s global injection from actually being injected into it.

None the less, just copy/paste the SpecialK64.dll file from the Special K folder into the game folder and rename it to dxgi.dll and that should do it as well – although the config file and all logs will be stored in the game folder itself.

Good to know I’m not the only one not getting it to work at all

I’m using a non-steam version of the game and tried copying SpecialK64.dll into the game folder and renaming it to dxgi.dll , also tried creating an empty SpecialK.dxgi file there, also tried manually creating the My Mods/SpecialK/Profiles/HorizonZeroDawn.exe/SpecialK.ini, running both the game & SpecialK as admin (and all combinations), and nothing seems to work.

The whitelist ini never gets created, the OSD doesn’t work (that’s beacause of DX12 right?)

If it’s not doing anything when naming it dxgi.dll, then you’re probably missing the Visual C++ 2019 runtime.

When this was a Steam store exclusive product, all the dependencies were installed automatically. So SKIF does not even have checks for this.

https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe

yes borderless mode. but special k mod crashing on startup

special k mod crashing on startup

video
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uNDKI9IljVkCB4ao1yIxVqXUH-GbR28p/view?usp=sharing

Ah that did the trick, I guess the day I stop having issues with c++ runtimes / redistributables is the day I stop playing videogames haha

Sadly though performance seemed to suffer, from 59 average fps down to 51 in the benchmark, I’ll play for a few minutes see how it behaves there

Edit: So far so good, buttery smooth, impressive

Skip using SKIF and just use SpecialK64.dll renamed to dxgi.dll and put in the game folder instead.

Happened to me as well. Changing the in-game Display Mode to Windowed instead of Borderless fixed this for me.

edit: my bad, somehow vsync is accidentally turned on when I made this change, I didn’t notice any significant performance drop compared to turning vsync off, though it does causes the sound to stutter along the frames if any stutter occurs.

You actually want to turn on vsync so that if low fps happens it will smooth out the frames and not have too many issues.

You want to turn on VSYNC so there’s no tearing, no other reason than that :stuck_out_tongue:

SK supports tearing in windowed mode, most D3D11/D3D12 software does not support that. So VSYNC in windowed mode usually has no affect one way or the other. The setting “AllowTearingInDWM” is what enables tearing, and it’s turned on here. So if you turn VSYNC off, it actually turns VSYNC off.