LuminalShine 26.07.0: The MoonDeck Compatibility Release
The Gold release of the 26.07 series, consolidating beta.1, beta.2, and beta.3. This cycle's theme is making LuminalShine a first-class host for handheld clients — a Steam Deck running MoonDeck can now sleep and resume mid-session without killing the stream, and reach the host's Steam overlay without a forwardable Guide button — while also eliminating LuminalShine's interference with games on the host, whether streaming or idle.
New since 26.07.0-beta.3: YUV 4:4:4 streaming with auto-engage and in-flight 4:2:0 fallback, the public binary-signing card on the Troubleshooting page, and removal of the non-functional LB+RB+Start Guide combo (the other five combinations are unchanged).
General
- YUV 4:4:4 Streaming (Settings → Capture, default on). Full-resolution chroma — noticeably sharper text and UI — auto-engages: when the encoder probe confirms the GPU can encode 4:4:4 (NVENC, QuickSync, or software), it is advertised and capable Moonlight clients negotiate it automatically with no interaction required. On GPUs without 4:4:4 support (or unknown capability) the switch reads off and is locked, and nothing is advertised. The Session Details panel shows a YUV444 chip reflecting the effective chroma of each session.
- Sunshine-glass Web UI rebrand with a complete session telemetry pipeline: per-stream encode latency, throughput, FPS, and host CPU/GPU/RAM/VRAM history rendered in the new Session Details panel.
- MTT VDD has been removed entirely. SudoVDA is now the only shipped virtual display backend. A configured virtual_display_backend = mtt logs a warning and selects SudoVDA; pre-existing MTT driver installations are left untouched (removable via Device Manager or pnputil). The installer no longer offers or ships the MTT driver.
- Announcing LuminalVGD — the first-party Luminal Video Graphics Display Driver (NortheBridge/LuminalVGD, AGPL-3.0 with commercial licensing under the NortheBridge Access License Agreement). Pre-development; tracked in-tree at src/drivers/luminal-display, it will supersede SudoVDA as the default backend when it ships. The Troubleshooting page now carries a reserved identity block that will show the driver's version, paired LuminalShine release, build time, and signing information.
- Native frame-generation handling. LuminalShine detects DLSS Frame Generation in the streamed game and engages the frame-generation capture fix automatically — no per-app configuration required. The per-app toggles remain as manual overrides.
- Frame limiter is scoped to the streamed game. The RTSS frame cap targets a per-game application profile instead of the RTSS Global profile, so nothing else on the host gets capped. Profiles created by LuminalShine are cleanly removed when the stream ends.
- Public signing information on the Troubleshooting page: publisher (NortheBridge Foundation), signing method (Authenticode via SSL.com eSigner), how to verify a download, and the running build's version, commit, and build date.
- Documentation refreshed with the new Learn Dark theme and sunshine palette.
Windows 11
- New: per-app "Keep virtual display while paused." Each application's Setting Overrides section has an Application Runtime toggle that keeps the LuminalShine virtual display active when the client disconnects or the device sleeps mid-session — for example a Steam Deck suspending via MoonDeck. On wake, the stream resumes cleanly instead of failing with an RTSP error. The physical display configuration is restored when the app quits, and global revert-on-disconnect behavior stays untouched for every other application.
- New: Home/Guide Button Combo (Settings → Input). Emulate a Home/Guide press on the virtual controller by holding a chosen button combination on the streamed gamepad — opening the host's Steam overlay from clients that cannot forward a real Guide press (on a Steam Deck running MoonDeck, the Steam button is consumed locally, previously leaving the host overlay unreachable mid-session). Available combinations: Start+Back, Back+X, Back+Y, D-Pad Right+X, D-Pad Left+Y. Off by default, once per press with a one-second debounce, works on both classic Moonlight and WebRTC sessions, and can be scoped per application via Setting Overrides.
- In-flight YUV 4:4:4 → 4:2:0 fallback. If a negotiated 4:4:4 session fails at encoder start (for example the GPU driver or display path rejects it), LuminalShine logs a clear error naming the failed stage and retries the session at YUV 4:2:0 instead of failing the stream; the session stats update to reflect the effective chroma.
- Fixed: games could fail to launch while LuminalShine ran in the background. RTSS is no longer kept alive across paused sessions — its hooks inject into every starting process, which prevented some anti-tamper titles from launching at all. Any RTSS instance LuminalShine starts is terminated at every limiter teardown and relaunched on resume.
- Fixed: severe system-wide GPU performance loss while LuminalShine idled (benchmarks and games dropping from 120+ to ~20 FPS). Two causes addressed: a temporary virtual display retained after a failed encoder probe is reaped after 3 idle minutes instead of persisting indefinitely, and the process's REALTIME GPU scheduling priority is restored to normal after the startup probe and at stream stop.
- Fixed: streamed GPU-bound titles losing significant frame rate. The frame cap no longer applies machine-wide, and an idle host no longer outranks the foreground game at the GPU scheduler.
Windows 11 Experimental Preview
- With MTT VDD removed, the guidance for SudoVDA's known WUDFHost hang on Insider Preview channels has changed: use Troubleshooting → Restart Virtual Display Driver, which PnP-disables and re-enables the SudoVDA device scoped to that device only. The Web UI warning text points there instead of suggesting a driver switch.
- The SudoVDA reliability caveat on current release and Insider Preview builds remains the primary motivation for LuminalVGD (see General).
Security Fixes
- Reduced shipped driver and supply-chain surface: the vendored third-party MTT VDD signed driver binary (DLL/INF/CAT) has been removed from the repository and the installer payload, leaving a single virtual display driver pending the first-party LuminalVGD.
- Process-injection surface hardening: LuminalShine-started RTSS never outlives the frame limiter session, so its injection hooks cannot persist into processes launched after a stream ends.
Hotfixes
- Encoder probe: the H.264 YUV 4:4:4 capability test silently validated 4:2:0 due to a struct-initializer mismatch, so H.264 4:4:4 could be advertised on GPUs unable to encode it — the concrete cause of mid-flight 4:4:4 session failures. The probe now tests what it advertises.
- Gamepad: the LB+RB+Start Guide-combo option introduced in beta.3 did not function and has been removed; configs referencing it fall back to disabled with a logged warning.
- RTSS: a mid-session limiter refresh could silently fall back from the per-game profile to the Global profile — fixed.
- NVIDIA Control Panel limiter users: the frame-generation auto-fix no longer removes an NVCP frame cap without replacement when RTSS is unavailable.
- Virtual display: fixed a race where the idle-display reaper could remove a display that an incoming launch had just claimed.
- RTSS crash-recovery snapshots record per-game profiles created by LuminalShine, so a crash cannot orphan them.
- Release pipeline: the MSI compatibility gate no longer fails on UI-only changes — content-hashed web bundle renames are normalized while genuine file additions, removals, and identifier drift on stable files still fail the gate.
Upgrade notes: existing installs upgrade in place from any 26.07.0-beta.x or 26.06.x; the MSI upgrade path is verified by the release pipeline's compatibility gate. If you previously selected MTT VDD, LuminalShine switches to SudoVDA automatically on first start.
Full changelog: 26.06.4...26.07.0
