Special K

What is Special K?

"Lovingly referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of PC gaming, Special K does a bit of everything. It is best known for fixing and enhancing graphics, its many detailed performance analysis and correction mods, and a constantly growing palette of tools that solve a wide variety of issues affecting PC games." [1]

Compared to RivaTuner Statistics Server:

• Considered to have the best framerate limiter, ahead of RTSS and behind the top limiter in the NVIDIA driver
  • But, note that the NVIDIA driver framerate limiting does not have the same kind of framepacing logic as either Special K or RTSS.
• RTSS is mainly used for framerate limiting while Special K does much, much more

Resources

• Homepage

Tips

Special K can force or lock to a certian refresh rate

• tl;dr In the game's SpecialK.ini set [Render.FrameRate].RefreshRate=60.0
  • You can also set this in the in-Game SpecialK overlay
• Some older games may get confused about what refresh rate they should be vsync'd to
  • Eg. Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands on a Windows 10 system using an LG C4 tv as a monitor

Notes:

• There's also [Display.Monitor].RefreshRateForMonitor but I'm not sure how it relates. Mine is set to 0.0 and things seem fine so I guess it's not needed.

Troubleshooting

SDR Image Looks Washed Out (Not related to HDR)

• tl;dr Set sRGB Bypass to Strip in the in-game overlay or set sRGBBypassBehavior=0 in the game's SpecialK.ini file
  • Also works: Set sRGB Bypass to Passthrough in the in-game overlay (you need to choose another option first and then select Passthrough) or set sRGBBypassBehavior=-1 in the game's SpecialK.ini file
  • INI default is sRGBBypassBehavior=-2 which shows as Passthrough in the SpecialK in-game overlay but the washed out image occurs in this case