Special K v 21.04.04 - [Now with D3D12 Support]

Development Version History
#1

New Version Scheme

SK has switched to YYYY.MM.DD version numbers to make things simpler, and the new release cycle uses Discord for development / testing and Discourse forums for stable official releases.

D3D12 Support

  • Special K’s core overlay functionality is supported in all D3D12 games now
  • Full support for HDR Retrofit + Screenshot Capture / Tonemap
  • Texture Mods and Steam Achievement popups are Unsupported; no immediate plans to implement

D3D11 Improvements

  • Enhanced support for forcing DXGI Flip Model in games (i.e. Unity) that use sRGB gamma
  • Experimental support for dgVoodoo 2 to translate D3D9 to D3D11 w/ SK HDR

HDR Improvements

  • Support for multi-monitor mixed HDR/SDR and toggling HDR on/off while a game is running
  • Tonemapped screenshots can be copied directly to the system clipboard
  • New ACES and HDR10 Passthrough Tonemap modes

Framerate Limiter

  • NVIDIA Reflex Integration for all D3D11/12 Titles
  • Render Latency metrics (GPU vendor agnostic) added to the framepacing graph in D3D11/12 (Flip Model)
  • Simplified configuration for Low Latency and Low Stutter modes

Microsoft Store

  • Injection into UWP Desktop Bridge (Win32) Games works reliably by whitelisting “WindowsApps” in SKIF

     Download Special K v 21.04.04

9 Likes
#3

Oh, the official release? Very nice! Can’t wait to see what comes next as well!

By the way, how does NVIDIA Reflex work? I’m assuming you actually need hardware support to see any improvement? Because I have tested with my LG CX/1070 Ti and noticed no difference between having it on/off.

#4

* Experimental support for dgVoodoo 2 to translate D3D9 to D3D11 w/ SK HDR

Yes! Super excited about this!

1 Like
#5

Most DX9 games I’ve tried running in HDR crash however Watchmen seems to work flawlessly so that’s a good sign of things to come. Textures for games running D3D9-11 still go to “Unused” but you can extract and inject replacements for the majority of games. I’ve noticed Freesync/Gsync improvements when SpecialK is injected too.

#6

Have you thought about doing a thread or something on dx9->dx11 texture injection, such as what games work, what you do, what formats work, etc?
I’ve not had any luck with it, at the most I’ve got it to say it’s replaced but it’s still the original texture that shows in game and the preview, and if it’s a different format to the original it doesn’t even get that far.

#7

Busy with SKIF at the moment.

My plan is to have a Help section in SKIF to detail the experimental features and how to get them to work.

#8

Oh, I’d meant for that to be a reply to wastelander, but having stuff like that as part of SKIF itself would be nice at some point in the future, thanks

#9

It’d be very complicated to do that. Some games require D3D9=False and others require it true in the SpecialK.ini. The dgvoodoo config file can also cause issues as well, depending on the settings - many of which aren’t available in the GUI and can only be edited via notepad. DX9-11 injection should work with most games out of the box but there’s a few problematic games that won’t start or freeze on startup etc. To get a compatibility list you’d have to test a lot of potential combinations that either a dgvoodoo or SpecialK update can break/fix at any time. In addition to this I’ve experienced problems on AMD cards that don’t exist on NVIDIA cards while using dgvoodoo. It’s not impossible to make a list but it’d be a lot of work and potentially more difficult to maintain than the PCGW SpecialK compatibility list.

Texture editing is an issue for that reason too. Some games need mipmapping on for SpecialK to be able to inject textures into them, some games need it off. There’s also an issue with textures not appearing in “used”. Some games having multiple LODs for textures that all need to be edited for the mod to work (a lot of UE3 games are like that) which makes it difficult to extract certain LODs if they’re based on distance from the camera. Along with certain texture formats not injecting correctly for some engines, it’s difficult to say for certain which games work with texture injections and which ones only partially work/don’t work.

That being said I’ve had some success with texture injection using dgvoodoo with games like Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary, Arkham Origins Blackgate, Prototype and GTA Vice City. I’ve had less success getting HDR working in those titles but it’s still early days.