The Unreal Engine 1FPS Bug

Being this is probably one of the most widespread issues Special K can encounter, and there’s no solution to automatically filter which games are affected by this bug, I’d say that just investigating exactly which games are affected, as well as how to mitigate this bug, is worth a thread of it’s own.

So far I’ve found four games with this issue, Fable Anniversary, Killer Is Dead, Borderlands 2, as well as The Pre-Sequel.

Killer Is Dead is affected by other bugs, considering I witnessed a good ol Vertex Explosion, and also the low FPS only actually happened during actual gameplay for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend.

Generally it’s not an issue unless you apply window overrides.

The Unreal Engine handles window changes synchronously, so any kind of change to the window style (e.g. removing border decorations) will cause a position change and that leads to UE3 re-calculating the size of the window and moving it to a different position. That creates a feedback loop of size / position changes.

They fixed that bug in UE4. I’ve never found a good way to workaround the bug.

If I remember correctly, doesn’t delaying injection work to at least temporarily mitigate this bug? The PCGamingWiki seems to mention that as a potential solution.

Yes, if you launch the game and then start Special K after the game’s done messing around with its window position it will help… but the second you make any in-game graphics setting changes you’re probably going to trigger the problem again. Alt-Tab is likely to also create problems unless the game’s configured for borderless window.

Basically all UE3 DX9 games have that problem.

SK 0.8.43 was seemingly the last version to properly support UE3 DX9 32 bit games.

It might help to trigger Geforce Overlay for Nvidia owners, before a game launches, then closing the overlay after launch. Haven’t tested on AMD.

The only difference between this version and every version after, is the Steam_API files.