Polaris v1.0.13

Polaris v1.0.13 is the Auto Quality release. The host now works more closely with Nova to pick a stream profile, observe how the session behaves, and recover toward the best playable balance of smoothness and image quality.

Highlights

• Auto Quality is now the main tuning path: AI Optimizer and Adaptive Bitrate feed the same stream-quality decision system instead of feeling like separate expert toggles.
• Smarter recovery profiles: Polaris can react to bad frame pacing, host render pressure, encode pressure, and stream health by choosing safer FPS, resolution, and bitrate targets on the next launch.
• Quality can climb back up: good sessions are preserved as useful evidence, so the optimizer has a path back toward higher FPS and better image quality instead of staying stuck in a conservative fallback.
• Better Nova coordination: Polaris exposes client capabilities, applied settings, presentation state, sync status, adaptive bitrate state, and optimizer status through richer APIs.
• Cleaner handheld launches: launch recommendations are normalized against the actual Nova request, so the session starts closer to what Polaris will enforce.
• More honest Linux diagnostics: logs and session state now make capture transport, frame residency, encoder target, GPU-native fallback, and CPU-side copy paths easier to understand.
• Expanded test coverage: optimizer decisions, adaptive bitrate, stream stats, launch validation, game library handling, and process/runtime behavior have broader automated coverage.

Why it matters

The goal is less manual tuning. Instead of asking users to guess whether stutter is network, bitrate, encoder, decoder, or host rendering, Polaris now has better signals and a clearer recovery path. Nova can show that state back to the player as Auto Quality rather than exposing a pile of disconnected switches.

Release assets

• Arch Linux package
• Fedora 42, Fedora 43, and Fedora 44 RPMs
• Ubuntu 24.04 DEB tester package

Paired Nova release

For the best experience, use this with Nova v1.0.5 or newer:
https://github.com/papi-ux/nova/releases/tag/v1.0.5