NortheBridge/luminalshine 26.08.0-beta.1

LuminalShine 26.08.0-beta.1: The LuminalVGD Release

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LuminalShine 26.08.0-beta.1

The LuminalVGD release: NortheBridge's first-party virtual display driver (LuminalVGD v0.1.0-alpha.1) is now bundled, installed, and used by default — and SudoVDA is retired.

Virtual display: LuminalVGD is now the driver

• LuminalVGD ships in the installer and is selected automatically. Per-client virtual monitors with exact modes (millihertz-precise refresh, up to four modes per monitor), identity retention across reconnects, and a driver-side lease watchdog. (#78, #79)
• SudoVDA is removed. It is unmaintained and unreliable; no LuminalShine version ships it going forward, and the installer removes an existing SudoVDA install (driver, devices, certificates, registry) on every new install, update, or reinstall. Legacy installer flags (sudovda, mtt) map to LuminalVGD with a warning. (#85)
• Direct frame-ring capture: frames go from the driver's shared-texture ring straight into the encoder — no WGC helper process, no desktop-capture API in the hot path, with latency parity and seamless WGC/DDA fallback if the ring is ever unhealthy. (#80)
• HDR10 end to end on virtual displays: the driver advertises HDR10 via CTA-861.3 EDID, Windows engages advanced color, the ring carries FP16 scRGB, and streams encode HEVC Main10 (4:4:4 where the GPU supports it) and AV1 10-bit. (#81)
• Hardware cursor: the driver owns the cursor plane and LuminalShine composites it at encode time with the same GPU blend path used for physical displays — including correct HDR brightness and smooth cursor motion over an idle desktop. (#83)

Reliability

• Ring transport hardened against a cross-process race that could stall live streams (~1 minute in) and freeze video at game menus: writers now take slots with an atomic hand-off (take-CAS), consumers deliver strictly monotonically, and capture waits out swapchain reassignments (mode changes, fullscreen transitions) instead of tearing the pipeline down. (#82)
• Fixed a crash on reconnect after ping timeout: deferred stream-start actions no longer run for cancelled sessions, and NVIDIA Control Panel restore can no longer trip the teardown watchdog. (#82)
• Fixed a critical mid-stream failure class (stream drops → persistent RTSP 500s on reconnect → monitors never restored, escalating to kernel callout-watchdog storms): driver build 7 keeps all cursor work off win32k callouts with hard teardown deadlines, and recoverable capture failures now reinitialize instead of ending every session. (#84, LuminalVGD #15)
• Update checker: hotfix-suffixed prerelease tags now rank correctly.

Web UI

• VGD Control Panel is live: backend, virtual display mode, display layout, activation, disconnect/pause behavior, and refresh doubling — bound to real settings with autosave (the prototype's placeholder controls are gone).
• VGD About reports live driver identity: install/ready status, Device Manager driver version, the driver handshake (proto 0.3 build 8), HDR10 capability, active backend, and a working release-update check.
• Dashboard Discord button now links to the NortheBridge community channel.

Compatibility notes

• Windows 11 required for virtual displays (24H2 recommended — required for full HDR).
• Existing virtual_display_backend = sudovda configs fall back to automatic selection.
• If a stream ever falls back, capture transparently uses WGC/DDA exactly as before.

Full changelog: 26.07.1-beta.2...26.08.0-beta.1