LuminalShine 26.11.1

LuminalShine 26.11.1 is a reliability update covering all changes after the 26.11.0 release commit, 2c31b50, through dd45a431817c83f99f1ca1e45f062ce59cef1bca. It corrects capture-backend reporting, prevents a shutdown crash during NVIDIA preference restoration, and adds AV1 recovery when the native D3D12 encoder cannot retrieve its first frame. All fixes are included in PR #249.

The security fixes, display-watchdog teardown fix, and host-discovery metadata introduced in 26.11.0 remain included.

Capture status in Mission Control

• Report the capture backend actually used by the streaming worker. An isolated worker could capture directly through LuminalVGD while the host's Diagnostics page continued to report WGC. Capture-backend changes now travel from the worker to the host during startup and streaming, including fallback to WGC.
• Show both the backend and display. Diagnostics no longer lets the display name hide the active capture engine. Updates are sent when capture status changes, preserving a meaningful status age.
• This corrects reporting; it does not introduce a fullscreen-mode trigger. A game running in borderless fullscreen does not, by itself, select LuminalVGD capture. The active display and capture-backend availability still determine the path.

NVIDIA preference cleanup and shutdown stability

• Prevent a crash when startup is interrupted. An early exit while waiting for displays could leave NVIDIA profile restoration to a global destructor. That restoration could try to log after the C++ logging/locale runtime was being torn down, ending the host with a terminate exception.
• NVIDIA preferences are now restored before logging teardown on every main-scope exit path, including interrupted startup and normal shutdown. The global destructor no longer retries restoration late in process teardown.
• Cleanup exceptions cannot escape during unwinding. Failed restoration retains the undo journal for recovery on the next startup and still attempts to unload NVAPI.

AV1 availability and connection reliability

• Retry a failed AV1 D3D12 probe through D3D11. On affected hosts, AV1 initialization succeeded but retrieving the first encoded frame failed with NV_ENC_ERR_INVALID_PARAM. Previously, repeated attempts used the same transport and could leave AV1 shown as unavailable. The next AV1 attempt now uses D3D11 compatibility transport after this specific first-frame failure.
• Keep probing and streaming consistent. The host passes the selected AV1 transport to the isolated streaming worker. AV1 is advertised only after validation produces an encoded IDR; the fallback does not force an unsupported codec to appear available.
• Correct NVENC API-version handling. Driver version 13.1 was decoded and logged as 209.0. The driver maximum is now converted to the API's normal version representation before compatibility checks.
• Correct output-resource registration and improve diagnostics. D3D12 output buffers no longer receive an input-only registration fence; per-frame output completion fencing remains in place. Bitstream-lock failures now include NVIDIA's detailed error message when available.

The AV1 change addresses the host-probe failure seen in the supplied logs. Failed AV1 probes could repeatedly invalidate the capability cache and add tens of seconds to connections, even for HEVC sessions. Successful fallback can avoid that failure condition, but this release does not change the cache's retry policy or promise a fixed connection-time reduction.

The compatibility choice lasts until process restart and applies to AV1 across adapters. A first-frame failure occurring only inside a worker after a successful host probe is not propagated back to later workers. Hardware streaming validation is still required to establish behavior on each affected GPU. No disconnection-time improvement is claimed; display restoration and helper teardown timing are unchanged.

LuminalVGD driver

The bundled virtual display driver is unchanged:

Build 27 retains the D3D12 timeline-fence transport and teardown/drain protections. Upgrading from 26.11.0 does not normally require replacing this display driver. The separate VHF virtual gamepad package also remains unchanged: v0.1.0-beta.9, driver 0.1.0.53, protocol 2.

Project, tests and release engineering

• Added regression tests for capture-status serialization and malformed payloads, NVIDIA preference restoration and exception handling, driver API-version decoding, and AV1 compatibility selection and worker handoff policy.
• Advanced the host/worker IPC version from 10 to 12 for capture-status messages and AV1 transport selection. Host and worker binaries must be upgraded together.
• Included the existing root-level featurebase-releases.yml definition. This file is not an active GitHub Actions workflow; release-note imports continue through .github/workflows/featurebase-releases.yml.
• Local validation passed 25 focused tests: 15 NVENC API/compatibility tests, 6 NVIDIA preference-cleanup tests, and 4 capture-status tests. Scoped frontend formatting and whitespace checks passed. Existing frontend typecheck/lint failures were reproduced unchanged against the baseline.

Release validation: Windows release build passed compilation, signing, signed-payload integrity, MSI upgrade/invariant checks, the 181-test connection/security gate, all 4 server-metadata tests, and all 5 configuration-consistency tests. The portable ZIP gate verified 8 signed executables against their pre-packaging hashes. All 25 focused tests listed above also passed in the Windows test run.

The broader advisory suite completed with 883 passes, 12 failures, and 10 skips (905 total). The 12 failing test names exactly match 26.11.0: one authentication error-text expectation, eight Playnite tests, and three locale-consistency tests. This is not an all-tests-green release. A physical Moonlight streaming session and GPU-level AV1 recovery were not performed as part of this release validation.

Upgrading

• Install LuminalShine 26.11.1 over the previous release with the installer. Settings and pairings are retained; an active stream ends during the upgrade and can be restarted after the service returns.
• Replace the complete application package when using the portable build. Do not mix host and worker binaries from different releases.
• Hard-refresh Mission Control (Ctrl+F5) if old assets remain cached. Use Changelog in navigation to reopen these notes.
• For an affected AV1 host, restart after upgrading and check codec availability. If compatibility recovery is needed, the log records “AV1 retry using D3D11 compatibility transport.” Test AV1 streaming in SDR and HDR where supported; include host and worker logs if it remains unavailable.
• Regular Moonlight sessions, Borealis compatibility, the browser Play page, and opt-in PyroWave support retain their existing connection paths.

Checksums

SHA-256:

881f2ffc849f11df22e6bb6f7d24215bc09d0d1d0f72415c50d133bf375b2c3c  LuminalShine_x64-debuginfo.7z
15275634e410c6a25a2e1f9e4a2361dbc7d2d908dffafaef47c0c9187501a96c  LuminalShine_x64-installer.exe
fac8557d0af5576fc865109581a894ead6876e2f223a39be6621d8815b670a69  LuminalShine_x64-portable.zip

The same hashes are attached as SHA256SUMS.

Full changelog: 26.11.0…26.11.1