MatrixRain 1.7.0

[1.7.0] - 2026-09-24

Added

• Native HDR output. On a monitor with Windows HDR turned on,
  MatrixRain now presents in HDR itself instead of being converted by
  Windows. The rain sits at the brightness you set with the Windows "SDR
  content brightness" slider and follows it live, so with highlights off
  it looks the same as on an SDR monitor. Each monitor is handled on its
  own: an HDR and an SDR monitor side by side both look right, and
  turning HDR on or off in Windows takes effect within a second without
  restarting. The screen saver preview, and any failure to switch,
  fall back to SDR.
• HDR highlights. On HDR monitors, the head of each streak and the
  brightest glyphs just behind it now shine brighter than normal white,
  in their own color, with their glow, up to what the monitor can show.
  The rest of each trail stays at your normal brightness. Highlights
  roll off smoothly toward the monitor's peak rather than clipping. How
  much room there is depends on the monitor's peak brightness and the
  Windows SDR content brightness slider: the lower that slider, the more
  the highlights stand out.
• HDR settings. The Visuals tab has an HDR highlights setting
  (Auto or Off) and a Brightness slider for how bright highlights
  get. When no monitor has HDR turned on the controls gray out and the
  dialog says why; if a monitor supports HDR but has it turned off, it
  also offers a link that opens the Windows HDR settings.

Changed

• Light is now combined as light. The renderer composites glyphs
  and their glow in linear light with float render targets, instead of
  in the display's gamma-encoded 8-bit values. Fading tails on black are
  smooth all the way down with no stepped bands, antialiased glyph edges
  composite as light does, and where two bright heads pass each other
  the overlap adds instead of plateauing. Everything a user can tune
  keeps its meaning: the trail fade, the glow's strength, size, hue and
  behavior where streaks overlap, the Scanlines Intensity and Style
  sliders, and every color scheme reproduce what 1.6 put on screen, to
  within a few percent of mean brightness on a fixed test scene and
  indistinguishable side by side. No settings change.
• Shaders are compiled at build time. A broken shader is now a build
  error carrying file, line and message, rather than a blank screen at
  run time. The D3D shader compiler is no longer loaded by the app.

Fixed

• Dragging the window across a monitor boundary froze the app. In
  windowed mode, moving the window to a monitor with a different scale
  factor stalled it for five seconds, and sometimes for good, with
  Windows' translucent "not responding" ghost drawn over rain that was
  still falling. The window's resize handler was waiting on the render
  thread while the render thread was waiting on the window to finish
  resizing. The resize is now applied by the render thread itself, and
  the window answers at once. Present since windowed mode was added.
• Reset to defaults and Cancel did not fully reach the running rain.
  In the settings dialog, Reset moved every slider back, but density,
  speed, glow intensity and glow size kept their old values on screen
  until the slider was touched again; Cancel had the same gap.
• Cancel did not undo density, speed or glow. Moving those four
  sliders saved them at once, so after Cancel the rain looked right but
  the next start came up with the canceled values. The dialog now saves
  only on OK.
• Gray squares behind the info icons. The settings dialog painted a
  gray square behind each (i) icon on Windows 11's themed tabs; the
  icons now sit on the tab's own background.

Upgrade note

On an HDR monitor, streak heads are brighter than before. HDR
highlights are on by default (HDR highlights: Auto, Brightness 80%). To
keep exactly the 1.6 look, set HDR highlights to Off on the
Visuals tab. Nothing changes on SDR monitors.