Valve’s overlay has trouble counting my new feature… let’s find a better for Steam to use.
Say hello to 100 FPS that has the computational expense of 50 FPS (because it’s 50 FPS!!)
To be fair, this confuses the Xbox Game Bar too.
Ultra Low Latency Special K Style
The settings shown in that screenshot are a new “Ultra-Low Latency” mode I am working on. Effectively the latency of V-Sync off but without the tearing.
You do occasionally get a stutter if you cannot sustain the framerate limit target, but if you’re playing latency sensitive games and have a solid framerate, this is the smoothest and lowest latency experience you can get.
You know it is something uniquely different when it confuses less intelligent framerate counters
This update should help alleviate many of those problems. The DLL loads and unloads quicker and more cleanly. I didn’t mention any of that in the CHANGELOG, but I did some work on both SKIF + SpecialK to make starting and stopping global injection more reliable.
nice, I`m also playing ac odyssey will this version work well with it? could you make a revision to settings in odyssey. Don´t know why but the old SK deidcated to the game bump my fps by a huge amount. Curious to see if it can be improve even further!
You can try, but if I recall getting Special K to work in Ubisoft games is not easy. It’s either going to work, or not at all. No in-between wiggle room to reconfigure stuff when Ubisoft is invovled
Edge is Chromium too now though and that’ll be in effect in full come 20H2 / 19042
Could try without hardware acceleration too but that’s going to do some other issues and if your GPU doesn’t support certain video files and resolution outputs it’ll be CPU anyway.
Think AMD does up to VP9 3840x2160 but the new AV1 codec and AVC1 aren’t done through GPU I think?
NVIDIA is probably up to VP9 3840x2160 too possibly AVC1 but the new AV1 is not yet covered for.
x266h should also be a thing eventually speaking of video playback (But it’s a licensed format so who knows when that’ll get sorted.) and also above 4k resolution hardware video support.
Browser differences also playing in here, Chrome and Chromium playback versus Firefox for example and video hardware from AMD VCN (VCE earlier.) or NVIDIA (NVENC?) plus driver bugs.
(AMD currently has playback issues with high res or high framerate videos though more so outside of Chromium browsers it seems.)
EDIT: Oh nice.
Nier Replicant
With the sub-title of lots of numbers…
Version 1.22474487139
Has been rated in Taiwan so there’s a chance for more info on it soon.
EDIT: Not really that good at tech but I like what I am reading, dynamic resolution while likely having it’s own challenges and issues over a fixed back buffer resolution should allow for a high resolution final image scaling through DLSS while ensuring framerate is completely stable at whatever the target is.
VR will allow high resolution good image quality at a higher recommended framerate but would also have to be stable in how this scales to avoid motion related issues but it sounds good too.
Higher resolution and scaling to that sounds really good also, unsure if something like that was already achievable through DSR and DLSS together for well super-sampling down sampling reconstruction of the render resolution and final output but maybe it was capped to like 3840x2160 before and now it can go even higher.
Sounds good as well and if they can implement more AI research and additional scaling it could still look good above 4k while keeping only part of the resolution though I’d imagine you’d get more glitches and artifacts the further you scale up like that.
(Could still look really good though besides finer details and certain specific effects considering the framerate advantage.)
Enable Tearing in DWM
3.1 A non-zero framerate limit
3.2 A 0 presentation interval
Just satisfy the first 3 conditions, and the little button in the control panel will do the rest for you.
And of course, you do need a healthy margin of available GPU horsepower. This function is not for people who are struggling to hit a certain framerate, this is for those who have a solid framerate and want low latency frosting on their performance cake
Do people really use Patreon for early access to broken things? Am I missing a potential market, lol?
I have no idea how the logistics of giving Patrons exclusive bugs in unreleased versions you have to subscribe to get access to. That goes against what I’ve spent this entire project doing. You don’t have to pay to get a buggy version, I give those away for free
I do feel I’m supposed to be offering something in return for patronage though… it’s just difficult to think of any unique rewards when I prefer to give stuff to whomever asks.
Footer
Secret Footer of Despair
Meet the resident Ninja Neko, 🐱👤 Senpai Razerklaws likes to ambush
unsuspecting gaming mice and strangle them with their own micro USB tails.
Kaldaien rescues Type-C devices.
Frans Bouma moved his free camera utility over to Patreon and that seem to have worked really well with a early access availability and tiers of support.
Marty McFly and the ReShade ray-trace effect as well and some others.
(So yeah this does also work well outside of commissions and fan made adult content. )
The work on this and the recent support for Horizon Zero Dawn is pretty extensive though so I can see Patreon being really effective to fund similar amount of work on other titles plus patch support and what not.
ReShade is also getting (Limited.) compute shader support now so that might open up for some additional effects speaking of that and there’s even a few available although ReShade 4.8.0 is still a work in progress.
Unsure if ReShade itself will support some of the more in-depth techniques needed to fully utilize these types of shader effects though, probably not entirely doable.
EDIT: Oh yeah and I almost forgot about emulation of course, CEMU and such projects boosted fan driven funding to new heights like for getting Breath of the Wild in particular to be playable.
Emulation I suppose is a bit of a special area it’s constantly in development over years or decades balancing performance and various hacks or game specific workarounds even for projects aiming on near perfect accuracy and the involved user base and developers tend to be highly skilled as well since the requirements for doing this type of reverse engineering is pretty advanced requiring knowledge about some complicated programming fields or whatever I should call this.
EDIT: And from quick search Podcasts seem to be doing well.
34 thousand Patreons and 154 thousand a month in US Dollars for the top earner.
CapFrameX crashing because of RTSS. The two pieces of software are kind of built to work together, but for some reason on my system they are mortal enemies, lol.
I’ll be happy when my framerate limiter is a standalone library and someone can build a little tool like RTSS to inject it into games without the rest of Special K, then RTSS can go retire like FRAPS did a decade ago
I’m no marketing genius or anything, but I would presume that the next time a big buggy game comes out, and you have a solution for it, and that solution is in early access for 1-2 weeks locked behind a paywall, you will get people ponying up. People want things right meow, and I think in general the community is more understanding since they still get the free software if they have patience.
But idk how much tweaking and behinds the scenes work you need to do on a per game basis that the tool doesn’t do by default. Essentially customized game solutions, like how you used to have the different versions for each game. But this time you can still just bring them into the free version after early access.
The results are promising, though I have broken CapFrameX. I need to find a way to sample out the frames that aren’t even frames to get the real averages.
Observations
RTSS is marginally lower latency than SK’s default limiter
RTSS is marginally higher latency than SK’s new Ultra Low Latency (even with the noise skewing the results)
RTSS uses more CPU than a) SK’s Ultra Low Latency Mode, b) SK’s Normal Limiter, c) No Limiter
RTSS is less framerate stable than everything except for nothing at all
SK’s Ultra Low Latency Limiter uses the least CPU of all limiters ever tested
This is what I like to see.
I now have an option catering to people sensitive to latency, an option for maximum smoothness and … unfortunately a growing resentment for RTSS.
The product everyone praises (RTSS) in Steam forums, is being significantly outclassed by SK in every conceivable metric. Sometimes astronomically outperformed (i.e. CPU load).
At the risk of sounding like a self-absorbed asshole, I hereby declare there to be no valid user-case for framerate limiting using RTSS. SK is better across all possible metrics of performance.
Conclusion
When a Name Almost Makes Sense, but Not Quite
Ultra Low Latency Mode is definitely lower latency than RTSS and NVIDIA’s limiters, but only by the thinnest of margins. What makes it “Ultra” is when you compare its latency against SK’s normal Framerate Limiter.
Latency drops to less than 1/3 when compared to SK’s original limiter.
Persona 4 got update to 1.1 after a longer period of beta updates.
EDIT:
Nice to see them reporting the random crashes in the game hopefully they behave now and won’t cause further crashing.
EDIT:
Nice to also see SEGA committing to additional PC developments as per their earlier report.
Which is about the same as before and then surprise PC version announcement or reveal.
(Although for these games I guess getting Atlus onboard isn’t exactly the easiest but more could happen in the future after Catherine and Persona 4 doing far as I know pretty well.)
Turn the “Avoid Flicker” option off. It’s what’s causing that. That’s an extra rate limit that other games need or they will flash black screens occasionally.
EDIT: The ups and downs of browsing Steam title by title more or less and going through the daily update of new titles.
EDIT: Which yeah there’s upwards of 50 titles of ??? for one or two potential wishlist / text file writeup games or add-on content of interest.
The automated algorithm is at least better than Youtube now.
(Do you want 24 hours of random noise? Healing high-hertz music or sports and how about yet another Corona update regardless of how many of these you closed previously. Gah.)
Thanks to Microsoft’s design of IDXGISwapChain::Present (...), you use the same function call to check on the status of the swapchain’s queue as you do to add finished images to it
That’s fine, I guess, up until you realize every piece of software measuring framerate in existence makes the assumption that all calls to Present (...) are the beginning of a new frame.
This is why the 1% low is a sensible 49.9 FPS and the 99% high is 2,239.0 FPS. Those rapid bursts of commands that CapFrameX thinks were frames, are actually repeated calls re-ordering frames.
I may have to patch CapFrameX, the Microsoft Game Bar, the Steam Overlay, RTSS, … if I continue using this design, lol. Either that or lift up the hood in DXGI and go a level deeper (D3DKMT). None of those tools measure framerate using D3DKMT, so I can do what I need to do in peace without them seeing and measuring frames that are not frames.
Valve’s overlay has trouble counting my new feature… let’s find a better 
for Steam to use.
Special K Style
