v2.0.0 — Performance & Stability Overhaul

v2.0.0 — Performance & Stability Overhaul

This is a big one — a ground-up performance and stability rework contributed by the community
(huge thanks to @dhaern / Raxxoor for the PR #20). The app now uses a fraction of the CPU it
used to, captures frames on the GPU, and reads item names with the native Windows OCR engine.

What's new

• New OCR engine — Windows.Media.Ocr. Replaces Tesseract with the native WinRT OCR engine built
  for on-screen text. Items in the panel now detect quickly and reliably (Tesseract often missed a
  couple). No more tessdata files.
• GPU screen capture (WGC). Capture now runs on the GPU via Windows Graphics Capture, cutting CPU
  usage dramatically, with automatic fallback to the old GDI method if WGC isn't available.
  Configurable via CaptureBackend in config.json ("Auto" / "GDI").
• Lighter and faster all around — cached overlay rendering, faster panel detection, a price-key
  resolution cache, a length-bucketed fuzzy matcher, pre-compiled regexes, and parallel HTTP/2 price
  fetches.
• Stability fixes — overlay deadlock/concurrency fixes, atomic price snapshots, a GDI handle-leak
  fix, and a safer league-switch lifecycle.

Fixed

• Freeze when calibrating with the hotkey (#14). Pressing the calibrate hotkey (F4 by default)
  while the game was focused could freeze the app. The calibration overlay now reliably comes to the
  front so it can't get stuck behind the game. If you were hit by this, please grab v2.0.0.
• Per-monitor DPI kept correct on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups (no regression of #8).

Kept

• The Mirror / Headhunter easter eggs are still here — re-introduced on top of the PR. :)

Our due diligence on this release

Because this was a large community contribution, we didn't just merge it blind:

• Security review — audited the full diff and the built binaries: no new network endpoints, no
  process execution, no hidden build scripts, no embedded payloads, and every dependency verified as
  a legitimate package on nuget.org. Clean.
• Build & tests — builds with 0 warnings and all 87 unit tests pass on .NET 10; the new
  capture/OCR pipeline was smoke-tested against Path of Exile 2.

This is what the PoE community is about — someone saw a tool they liked, put real work into making it
better for everyone, and shared it back. That's the whole spirit of it. Thank you @dhaern. 🙏

Install

1. Download PoeAncientsPriceHelper-v2.0.0-win-x64.zip below.
2. Unzip it anywhere.
3. Double-click Start.cmd inside the PoeAncientsPriceHelper folder.

Self-contained — nothing to install, .NET is bundled.

Requirements

• Windows 10 version 2004+ or Windows 11 (required for the new GPU capture + Windows OCR).

Notes

• Windows SmartScreen may warn (the build is unsigned) — "More info" → "Run anyway".
• Antivirus may flag uiohook.dll — that's the global-hotkey library (SharpHook), expected.