Can February March?
No, but April May 😎
🤣🤣 anyway april is almost over, have a great weekend, and monthend

Hey, K. Did you see the new Ace Attorney collection? It has a weird issue on the oldest game that has 2d art where if you render above 1080p the art looks pixelated but rendering at 1080p on bigger displays blurs the ui and text. The only solution found is to deploy an external upscaler to the game at 1080p windowed to sharpen the ui. Could there be a better way to make the ui render at native but force the game to not show 2d art above 1080p? thanks

Nice, thanks!

Yes, except for Tales of Vesperia, that works with any version of SK.

I checked the wiki. The tales and disgaea do still require the standalone, right?

Anything older than 2017 requires the version of Special K it was originally shipped with. All new game-specific mods are built directly into SK. That's caused SK's DLL to become much larger over the years, but it's a hell of a lot less maintenance on my part :)

Hey, long time no see. Can the old fixes be used from their old downloads or will modern Special K automagically do what say Pretty Prinny or fixes for the tales games do?

As always, cheers for all your work man. I popped in to try and give you an award after seeing your Star Wars review (definitely could some some of that K Special) but it seems I've given all awards I could already bar the jester so here's cheers to you in the comments.

Oh, there goes my plan then. On PC will SK autofix the Tales games or do i need the old SKIF app?

Unlikely that Special K will work on Steam Deck. WINE doesn't implement even half of the APIs that Special K uses, it usually just aborts itself with a "stub: yadayada" error.

Hey K, the fixes for the old tales games are included in special k automatically? Or should i dig up SKIF for say Symphonia? I wanted to play ln steam deck but the fixes wont work there right? Thanks

I can't get SKIF to work with Fable 3 with the steam release. Is there a version that works with this version?

Also, as a heads-up, Auto HDR is working now for Sonic Frontiers, at least on Windows 11 Insider Preview Dev Channel. Seems Microsoft added it a couple days or so after the game was released.

Hey, just tried out the OpenGL Present Method mentioned in that Dwarf Fortress thread, while it was with other software I can say the difference is like night and day.

What do you get when you combine a Christmas tree with an iPad?
A pineapple!
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⢨⡔⠉⠢⡀⢀⠜⠑⢄⢀⠄⠋⠒⡅
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Harr Harr Harr!!
anyway, Merry Christmas!!
and May you have a Happy New Year

It's not civil to keep sending unsolicited messages after they were removed.

The testing methodologies used do not rule out other factors such as Steam's own API which I've personally seen bottleneck because I let it patch games during gameplay.

I am civil, idk what you're talking about man, and sonic mania isn't the only denuvo game, and last I checked, it had a huge slowdown on 1 part of the menu, when accessing time attack if i'm not mistaken, denuvo is well know to stutter games and worsen performance on good hardware, not to mention weaker hardware.

No I'm not mistaking anything, there's an entire youtube channel dedicated to denuvo testing, and all the tests pointed to that result, worsening performance, idc if games can't be pirated, i care when paying users get screwed because of a dumb drm that has been proven to do nothing to sales, most pirates will actually get the game if they like it (including me), having denuvo only makes me go away from getting the game lol.

Obviously if you run out of VRAM by setting the texture memory to ultra high it will stutter... duh.......

Honestly, I don't really care one way or the other. You're probably mistaking that for something it isn't. As long as Denuvo doesn't get in the way of "fixing" stuff by means of anti-debug, it's innocuous (refer to Resident Evil: Village for a problem obfuscated by Denuvo).

Games will be cracked within 6 months to a year, or the now (as of ~2019) time-limited license will expire (forcing the publisher to publish a patch without Denuvo or remove their game completely from the Steam store) and the problem solves itself.

Please remain civil, and also I have checked RAM usage of Sonic Mania and it was less than its .exe size.

Stuttering I have found to be on more demanding games running out VRAM. For example Doom Eternal if I set Texture Pool Size to Ultra Nightmare.

gotta say, it's funny that only games with denuvo are having these stuttering problems, even with the "fixes".

2 added seconds, the increased RAM usage, the increased CPU usage, the stutterings, yes I'm very upset, but if u like getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the arse who am I to judge, I also have weird fetishes of my own.

Someone upset a game's DRM added 2 seconds to the startup.

WTF are you even talking about?

The hell is your problem? Denuvo has been shown to affect not only performance, but also loading times, it's because of people like you that stuff like this happens, you're part of the problem, and they say ignorance is bliss.......

Wow, i remember years ago. A drunken European was flaming the ♥♥♥♥ outta Kal on FFX forums about the dreamstate motionblur.

Ok, thanks for the update 😊

And still has Denuvo, so we can rule that out?
(by the way, I finally managed to run Final Fantasy XV smoothly at 4K resolution, just have to be careful about the VRAM.)

It's playable. I'm sure it could be optimized more, but it's not the complete train wreck it was before the patch.

So is the calisto protocol actually fixed now?

So ray tracing is the reason shaders now need to precompile? Or dx12 is also to blame? From what i understand this is not a problem on console where they can just precompile and put the files on the game itself. Is there no way to do async compilation on dx12 new games?

That's only half of the problem. D3D12 has more complicated pipeline state caching, but UE4 is also carrying over the inefficient texture streaming from D3D11. If you opt-out of Ray Tracing and run the game in D3D11 mode, you only have texture streaming performance to worry about.

Marvel suns has the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ same problem. Why is this happening nowadays? UE4? Shaders are more complex? this didnt happen on older games. At leasts ome preload the shaders :(

No :-\ I'm waiting for this supposed patch that's going to fix the stutter... if it doesn't, then I'm refunding.

Can something be done about The Calistutter Protocol? beyond refunding i mean? lol

I think you just dodged a bullet after insulting the moderators. (moderators closed derailed why is P5R running so bad thread)

Re: Sonic Frontiers thread
You don't go to that internet cesspool do you?

@Crashed thanks, by that I assume you mean i cut the game off of the online features entirely?

You'd have to modify the source and disable all Steam features because your illegal DLL will cause conflicts.

hi, saw you in one of the forum thread about special K.
seeing as you are active in steam, figured i woud add you as friend so i can have easier access in friend's activity timeline.
cheers! and keep up the good work

Cool, ill give it a try

Or, rather, TSFix pre-dates that option, sorry ;)

That option pre-dates TSFix. It's probably not even needed in the version of SK uses for TSFix.

Will it fix, say, symphonia automatically if i run it after the ini edit?Thanks

Special K requires setting UsingWINE=true in the INI file to work in Proton. Otherwise, Proton will just abort when it encounters power management / parts of DXGI that it does not implement.

Hey, K, im about to play the old tales games on steam deck... special K works on linux, or am i effed? Ty

Hi, I know you commented to this post years ago https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/208650/discussions/0/530649887198142444/?l But I couldn't find anything other than that post and your solution. My problem is I have the same problem in Arkham knight I have AMD card. But idk how to do your solutions with my card. Please you are my only hope

Yes, that all works fine. You can manually install the stuff. Refer to our Discord if you need assistance. The Wiki should explain it. I try to stay away from Steam.

Hmm, interesting. So can takes of beseria still be "fixed" in terms of shadows and such?

Nothing can be done about that, SKIM is obsolete and the Wiki links to standalone versions these days.

@Metal Sophitia: SKIF only does that if you install games to a different disk drive than Steam is installed on. Valve changed the format of libraryfolders.vdf