Is it possible to change the style of the performance overlay?

Support
1

Hi!

I’ve been using Special K for a while now, and using Playnite I’ve basically been injecting into any game I play for the last half a year or so. I really like it! I mostly use it for the fantastic frame-limiter, but sometimes for the HDR cababilities on my TV, or just for the texture caching since my GPU has way more VRAM than the games I play use.

However, while many of the features are great, I do not really like the way the performance monitoring stuff looks. Is there a way to customize it? I would love to have a style that is more similair to the the Afterburner/RTSS overlay, since it shows just as much information, but is way more compact.

Any help would be appreciated!

2

when you say performance overlay here, are you talking about SK’s control panel (that can be brought up with ctrl + shift + backspace) ? and if that’s the case, have you tried SK’s widgets ?

for example (you can see the framepacing and gpu widgets in the following screenshot):

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you can also right click a widget and configure it in various ways; you can even set keybinds for them so you can toggle a widget whenever. i have my framepacing widget bond to CTRL + F and my GPU widget bond to Ctrl + G

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besides the widgets, SK also has a text/numbers OSD that can be configured to some degree; for example, you could change the color and position, plus there are different options you can pick for what this OSD will show

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in the above screenshot, I have my OSD set to just a compact framerate number with the “bottom-aligned” position and the color green

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but you could have various other options there too and can play with it.

also, by default, that OSD is bond to Ctrl + Shift + O

but you can bind that one to something else if you want. you could change the keys in SK’s macros.ini found in \SpecialK\Global -

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i bond my green OSD to num key 3 with Num 3=OSD.Show toggle

in the past, I used to use Ctrl+O=OSD.Show toggle (which would let me toggle it with Ctrl + O)

if you haven’t already, i suggest playing with the various OSD options available and setting keybinds for your widgets at least

3

Thank you! That at least got me part of the way.

I was mainly talking about the widgets, but did not know about the OSD.

However, I did find the customization options lacking for it, for example, it would be nice to be able to show a frametime graph, and not just a number?

When using RTSS (which is still my favorite overlay by far) it looks like this:
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And I would mostly like to emulate this kind of look. Is that possible?

4

nope; sorry, but that’s not currently possible with SK.

Kal did mention some time ago that he might make a more customizable OSD where you can pick and choose various different elements that currently cannot be put together to build a more custom OSD sort of like that… but it’s not really a priority currently and not sure if that’ll be done.

5

btw if you’re wanting to use SK and RTSS together (some people do this too), you may want to check the “use miscrosoft detours API hooking” option in RTSS’s settings (setup → general)

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having that checked typically avoids crashes/conflicts between RTSS and SK

oh and if you’re using an Nvidia GPU, keep in mind that nowadays RTSS may also inject reflex markers

if you want sk’s reflex stats to work correctly… it’s recommended to disable the reflex markers from RTSS, which can be done by unchecking RTSS’s “Inject NVIDIA reflex latency markers” option from RTSS’s settings also (setup → general)

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