Flux 1.5 — a redesign and temperature alerts

Flux 1.5 — a redesign and temperature alerts

Flux now has the same window design as Prisma and Mixtape, and it can warn you about GPU temperature and hot-spot temperature as well as VRAM. Just replace your old Flux.exe; your settings and leak log carry over.

A new look

• A title strip with a hero card. The headline reading sits at the top in its own card: how much VRAM is in use, the percentage, the GPU and process count, the session peak, and a progress line underneath.
• The VRAM card shows the trend. The big number moved up into the hero card, so the card below no longer repeats it. It now shows the last two minutes, with a tick marking the session peak.
• Metrics in a rail. The left column lost its separate boxes. Thin dividers separate the sections instead, and each section still jumps to its process view when you click it.
• Processes in their own card, with a header that shows the count and the total (for example 139 · Σ 15.9 GB). The mode switch and the search box now have room to breathe.
• Settings read as a table. Every slider is one row: name, track, value.
• A status line at the bottom. It shows that Flux is live, how often it refreshes, and the Ctrl+Alt+V shortcut that shows and hides the window.

Temperature alerts

• Set a threshold for GPU temperature and hot-spot temperature in the settings, next to the VRAM alert. Each alert shows a toast and beeps once when the reading crosses its threshold, and arms again once the reading drops back.
• Drag a temperature slider to the top to turn that alert off.
• An optional taskbar flash gets your attention while Flux is minimised.

Notes

• No admin needed (except the per-process NET view). GPU temperatures come from a bundled LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) running in a separate worker process.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe. Click More info → Run anyway.

Flux 1.4 — UI refresh + a much faster process list

Flux 1.4 — UI refresh, a much faster process list, and a reliability pass

Just replace your old Flux.exe; your settings and leak log carry over.

Faster

The process list used to reopen a fresh performance-counter query on every single tick. Measured on ~390 processes, the RAM view went from 36 ms to 6.9 ms per refresh — and because that work ran on the UI thread, that stall is what made the window feel sticky. The GPU counters and the CPU/DISK views got the same fix.

The old reason for reopening ("a persistent wildcard query goes stale and misses new processes") was tested and turned out to be false — a persistent query was run side by side with a fresh one for 14 ticks while processes were spawned and killed, and the two never disagreed on any of the four counters Flux reads. Queries are now only reopened to recover from a failure, so nothing is traded away for the speed.

Refreshed

• Click a metric card to jump to its view — the VRAM, NETWORK, CPU and RAM cards are now shortcuts to their per-process breakdown, with hover feedback.
• The mode pill slides instead of teleporting.
• Hot-spot is promoted to the temp card's companion slot with its own thresholds — it is the number that actually throttles the card, and it used to sit in 9px grey while the less important edge temp got the big colourful treatment.
• Network rates got a real number size, units muted next to them.
• The process header shows the view's total (e.g. 133 · 12.5 GB), not just an unlabelled count.
• A ghost tick on the VRAM bar marks the session peak, so you can see how far below the worst moment you are.
• Colour is earned: a value stays white while it is healthy and only turns amber/red when something is genuinely wrong, idle processes recede to grey, and processes that can't be ended show a lock instead of a ✕. Each accent theme now carries its own warning colours, so they can never collide with the accent.

Fixed

From a five-lens audit where every finding had to survive an adversarial second opinion:

• The window can no longer open somewhere you can't reach it. A saved position is validated against a live monitor before it is restored — if the display it was last closed on is gone, it falls back to centred. Flux has no title bar to drag it back with, so this one mattered.
• Alt+F4 and the taskbar's Close no longer bypass shutdown, which used to leave the machine-wide network trace running.
• A dead temperature sensor no longer reports a frozen reading as live (and no longer writes it into the log every minute) — the card now hides instead.
• A corrupt or hand-edited config can't crash startup; toggling a card no longer throws away your window height; a settings change made just before closing a maximized window is no longer lost; and sparklines no longer smooth real peaks down to ~75% of their true height.

Notes

• No admin needed (except the per-process NET view). GPU temperatures use a bundled LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) in an isolated worker process.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — More info → Run anyway.

Flux 1.3 — per-process DISK / I-O mode

Flux 1.3 — per-process DISK / I-O mode

The process panel's selector gains a fifth pill: VRAM · CPU · RAM · NET · DISK. DISK shows each process's real-time I/O throughput (MB/s → GB/s), sorted busiest-first with a mini-bar and the same red ✕ to end a process — the last Task-Manager column Flux was missing. Just replace your old Flux.exe; your settings and leak log carry over automatically.

What's new

• DISK mode — per-process I/O throughput via the PDH counter \Process(*)\IO Data Bytes/sec, consumed through the existing rate-sampler. Zero-dependency and needs no admin (unlike the NET view). The selector auto-widened so all five pills stay readable.
• Aggregates by process name, the ✕ kill path re-validates the live PID and greys out critical processes (e.g. System) exactly like the other views.

Honest note on the label

IO Data Bytes/sec counts all I/O a process issues — file plus network and device — not disk-only. Windows exposes no per-process disk-only counter without an admin ETW trace, so this matches how Task Manager's own "Disk" column behaves. A network-heavy process can therefore also appear under DISK.

Notes

• No admin needed (except the per-process NET view). GPU temperatures use a bundled LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) in an isolated worker process.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — More info → Run anyway.

Flux 1.2.1 — reliability patch

Flux 1.2.1 — reliability patch

Bug fixes from a full multi-lens audit. No new features — but strongly recommended. Just replace your old Flux.exe; your settings and leak log migrate automatically.

Fixes

• No more silent crashes from the temperature reader. GPU temps (LibreHardwareMonitor) now run in an isolated worker process, so a driver-level fault during a sensor sweep can't take the whole monitor down with it. The UI also no longer stalls ~15 ms on each read.
• Your settings can't be lost anymore. Config, leak log and snapshots now live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Flux (writable without admin — an install under Program Files previously failed all writes silently), and are written atomically, so an interrupted save can never truncate or wipe them. A corrupt config is backed up rather than overwritten.
• A bad config value can't brick startup. Persisted values are validated and clamped on load — a corrupt or hand-edited value no longer prevents launch or pegs a CPU core.
• Ending a process can't end Flux itself. Clicking ✕ on a shared name like python in the CPU/RAM/NET views no longer risks terminating the monitor.

Notes

• No admin needed (except the per-process NET view). GPU temperatures use a bundled LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0).
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — More info → Run anyway.

Flux 1.2 — mini task manager

Flux 1.2 — the mini-task-manager update.

Download Flux.exe below (single file, no install). Everything here runs with no admin except the per-process network view, which is opt-in.

Upgrading? Just replace your old Flux.exe — your settings and leak log are kept.

New

• Mini task manager. The processes panel gets a VRAM / CPU / RAM / NET selector at the top, so you can rank every process by GPU memory, CPU % (of total), RAM (private working set), or network throughput — each with a bar, value, and one-click ✕ to end it.
• Network card. Total download / upload throughput with a dual-line graph, read off the busiest real interface so VPN / Hyper-V / WSL adapters don't double-count.
• Per-process network (NET). Like Task Manager's Processes-tab Network column, via an ETW kernel trace. This is the one feature that needs administrator rights — without them the NET view offers a one-click restart elevated; everything else stays no-admin.
• Fully rounded UI. Every panel, the search box, the settings sliders, the accent swatches, the checkboxes and toasts now have soft corners to match the metric cards.

Faster

• ~17× lighter per-second sampling — process names are cached and the full process snapshot is only re-taken when the set of GPU processes changes (4.7 ms → 0.27 ms on a typical tick), so it's even lighter to leave running 24/7.

Notes

• No admin needed (except the NET view). GPU temperatures use a bundled copy of LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) via the user-mode driver.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — click More info → Run anyway.

Flux 1.1

Flux 1.1 — a tiny, portable GPU VRAM monitor for Windows. (Formerly VRAMeter.)

Download Flux.exe below (single file, no install, no admin). Built on an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT but works for any AMD / NVIDIA / Intel GPU.

New in 1.1

• New identity — Flux. A fresh gradient app icon (violet→pink→orange with flowing "memory in motion" waves) and a matching wave mark in the title bar. Your existing settings and leak log migrate over automatically.
• ~17× faster sampling. The once-a-second background sample no longer snapshots every running process on every tick — it caches process names and only re-reads when the set of GPU processes actually changes (4.7 ms → 0.27 ms on a typical tick). Even lighter to leave running 24/7.

Highlights

• VRAM at a glance — used vs. real card capacity, % bar, session peak, usage sparkline.
• Full telemetry — GPU load + busiest engines, power draw, temperature / hot-spot / VRAM temp, core & memory clocks, fan, plus CPU and RAM.
• Per-process VRAM — searchable, scrollable list of every process using the GPU, each with a one-click ✕ to end it and free its VRAM (with a live identity re-check so it can't kill the wrong/critical process).
• Leak hunter — flags processes whose VRAM keeps climbing (↑), logs a snapshot every minute to flux_log.csv, auto-dumps the full process list when VRAM suddenly jumps, and an in-app log viewer shows the biggest climbs.
• Mini mode — collapse to a tiny always-on-top strip (VRAM · % · GPU · temp) to park in a corner while gaming.
• Frameless UI — custom title bar, rounded corners, accent themes, remembered size/position, and a global Ctrl + Alt + V show/hide hotkey.

Notes

• No admin rights required. GPU temperatures use a bundled copy of LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) via the user-mode driver.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — click More info → Run anyway.

VRAMeter 1.0

VRAMeter 1.0 — a tiny, portable GPU VRAM monitor for Windows.

Download VRAMeter.exe below (single file, no install, no admin). Built on an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT but works for any AMD / NVIDIA / Intel GPU.

Highlights

• VRAM at a glance — used vs. real card capacity, % bar, session peak, usage sparkline.
• Full telemetry — GPU load + busiest engines, power draw, temperature / hot-spot / VRAM temp, core & memory clocks, fan, plus CPU and RAM.
• Per-process VRAM — searchable, scrollable list of every process using the GPU, each with a one-click ✕ to end it and free its VRAM (with a live identity re-check so it can't kill the wrong/critical process).
• Leak hunter — flags processes whose VRAM keeps climbing (↑), logs a snapshot every minute to vrameter_log.csv, auto-dumps the full process list when VRAM suddenly jumps, and an in-app log viewer shows the biggest climbs.
• Mini mode — collapse to a tiny always-on-top strip (VRAM · % · GPU · temp) to park in a corner while gaming.
• Frameless UI — custom title bar, rounded corners, accent themes, remembered size/position, and a global Ctrl + Alt + V show/hide hotkey.

Notes

• No admin rights required. GPU temperatures use a bundled copy of LibreHardwareMonitor (MPL-2.0) via the user-mode driver.
• Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt for the unsigned exe — click More info → Run anyway.