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Version history

Every update

Astrix is actively developed. Here's the full history.

v6.18.2 current

  • The real reason updates didn't stick. The Start-menu / desktop shortcuts and the app's registration pointed at the versioned extracted exe (Astrix.data\\<ver>\\Astrix.exe), not the launcher. That path changes every version — so after an update the shortcut aimed at a deleted folder or a leftover temp copy, and launching it ran an old or stale build.
  • Shortcuts, App Paths and the startup entry now all point at the one stable launcher, which always unpacks the current version, and the app re-asserts it on every launch so it self-heals. The uninstaller was hardened too — it can never target a drive root. 308 tweaks, 105 free.

v6.18.1

  • Fixed the in-app updater downloading but not sticking. The update downloaded, then the step that swaps in the new build failed silently and ran the new version from a temp folder — so you got it that one session, but the next launch was back to the old version.
  • Two causes: the copy over the installed launcher had no retry, so one antivirus lock on the fresh 67MB download made it give up; and a stale re-downloaded copy (Astrix (2).exe, (3)…) could re-extract an old version and undo it. The updater now retries and updates every launcher copy in the folder. 308 tweaks, 105 free.

v6.18.0

  • Customization pack — 12 new personalization tweaks, all free. Never-combine taskbar buttons with labels, accent colour on title bars, Start 'more pins' layout, hide most-used apps, Explorer selection checkboxes, remove OneDrive from the sidebar (without uninstalling it), always-expanded copy dialog, Copy-to / Move-to on the right-click menu, skip the Store 'open with' prompt, long file paths past 260 chars, and an opt-in hide-all-desktop-icons.
  • Every key was verified on a live Windows 11 build 26200 — path, hive and value type all checked on a real machine before shipping, not copied off a list. And deliberately not the '2,000 tweaks' a padded optimizer claims: each of these does something you can see. 308 tweaks, 105 free.

v6.17.2

  • One-click fix for downloads you can't open. If SmartScreen is set to Block, Windows removes the 'Run anyway' link from the blue warning box, so a downloaded app can't be launched at all. Older Astrix versions set that (stopped in 6.17.1); Security now has Restore SmartScreen's Run anyway button, which puts it back to Warn — same protection, but you can run a file you trust. Astrix also repairs it automatically on launch. 296 tweaks.

v6.17.0

  • The Fortnite and Valorant config optimizers are now FREE on every tier. They used to be Pro. Each reads the game's own config, shows which video settings are already good and which are costing you frames, then writes the competitive set with a backup — no licence needed.
  • CPU / Scheduling stays Pro — that's the deep per-process priority and affinity control, a different thing. The site and in-app pricing were updated to match, so nothing advertises the game configs as paid any more. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.16.3

  • The sidebar actually fits now. The previous attempt set Height on each nav item — which does nothing, because the visible row isn't the item, it's the NavigationViewItemPresenter inside it, and that takes its height from a theme resource (NavigationViewItemOnLeftMinHeight, default 40), not the item's Height. The numbers changed in code and nothing changed on screen.
  • The real fix overrides that resource to 30, which every row honours — taking the list from ~856px to ~570px. The window opens maximized by default (where even the old height fit); this matters when you run Astrix in a smaller window, which is where it overflowed. Nothing removed; every page still one click away. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.16.2

  • The app icon is finally the new mark, and the title-bar badge is the logo, not a plain letter A. Two separate causes.
  • The taskbar icon stayed green because the app's own Astrix.exe had the old icon baked in — and that exe is never rebuilt on a normal ship (PriGen aborts the build before the app-host is regenerated, so only the DLL gets swapped). Since it can't be rebuilt, the icon was patched directly into the exe's resources. Worth noting: the app-host keeps its icon at resource id 32512 and language 0, not id 1 / en-US — writing to the wrong one just adds a copy the shell ignores.
  • The title-bar A was a placeholder hardcoded in XAML (which can't ship — same broken toolchain), so it's now swapped at runtime for an image of the real mark, from the same icon file as the taskbar. Badge, window icon and favicon are guaranteed to be one mark.
  • If the old green icon lingers after updating, that's the Windows icon cache — unpin and re-pin Astrix, or sign out and back in. Nothing the app can force from inside. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.16.1

  • The sidebar no longer scrolls. It had grown to 19 entries across three groups, and at WinUI's default 40px row height that needs ~856px of pane while an 800px window leaves roughly 590px — so Benchmark, FPS Overlay and Actions sat below the fold.
  • Rows are now 26px and group headers 14px, bringing the list to ~561px — a third shorter, fitting without a scrollbar. Nothing was removed; every page is still one click away.
  • Two details that matter: height needs MinHeight and Height — MinHeight alone leaves the template's vertical padding and the row never shrinks. And Padding is left at the default, because zeroing it collapses the left indent and the rows shrink but go crooked.

v6.16.0

  • New Recovery page. Repair Windows runs DISM then SFC — in that order, because SFC repairs from the local component store and will fail or repair from bad sources if the store itself is damaged. It fixes corrupted system files from Windows Update without touching your files, programs or settings. That's the real answer to fixing Windows with no restore point.
  • Snapshot records what's installed so a rebuilt PC can be put back. It is a shopping list, not a backup — restoring re-downloads apps from the internet; it doesn't recover files and can't rescue a dead drive.
  • It can't cover everything, and it says so. Measured here, winget could reinstall 49 of 69 programs (~71%). The missing fifth is games, launchers and vendor tools. So the snapshot also writes a plain list of every program found, your driver packages, and a backup of your Astrix licence — and the app shows both numbers, not just the flattering one.
  • Astrix does NOT reinstall Windows, and no tool can do that from nothing. The method that keeps files and programs is an in-place repair install: mount the Microsoft ISO, run setup.exe from inside it (don't boot from it), choose "Keep personal files and apps". The page explains that rather than pretending to do it.
  • Nothing on this page deletes anything — no file removal, no uninstall, no reset. Also fixed: a failed reagentc check used to report "recovery is disabled", which would push people toward an ISO they may not need. It now says it couldn't check. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.15.0

  • An entire page was unreachable. Actions — Optimize My PC, Boost RAM, clean junk, restore point, TRIM, network repair — had a palette entry and a working dispatch case but no sidebar item, so there was no way to open it. Same missing-third-registration fault that hid Valorant in 6.14.0.
  • Worse: the command palette was dead code. Its only trigger was a floating button created by EnsureReflexMenu(true), and the sole call site passes false — the button never existed, so the palette could never open. It's now bound to Ctrl+K, making 30 destinations reachable that weren't.
  • Live monitoring never resumed after alt-tab. Polling pauses on focus loss to stay out of your way while gaming, but the resume was gated on being on the Dashboard — a page that stopped being a navigation destination in v6. Leave Hardware/Temperatures/Processes, come back, graphs stayed frozen. Pause and resume are now symmetric.
  • New logo. Keeps the triangular A and its split face so it's still recognisably Astrix, but the corners are chamfered and it runs cyan into violet to match the site instead of the old green. Favicon, app icon, installer icon and every inline copy are regenerated from one geometry — the favicon had been a different design entirely.
  • The site is no longer one 25-section scroll. Sections are grouped into six views — Home, Features, Benchmarks, Showcase, Pricing & Download, Roadmap & FAQ — switched from a tab bar under the nav. Every existing link still works: #download and friends now switch to the owning view and scroll there. Deep links and the back button work. With JavaScript off nothing is hidden, so it degrades to exactly the long scroll it was.
  • Honest limit: the bug sweep was meant to cover seven areas and finished two. Site HTML, site CSS/JS and tweak-catalog correctness were not audited — this fixes what was found, not everything there is. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.14.1

  • Valorant config optimizer — same rule as the Fortnite one: only settings the in-game Video menu already exposes, into Valorant's own files, game closed, backup first. It never touches the Valorant process — Vanguard is a kernel driver that stays loaded even when the game is shut, so the whole interaction is editing files on disk.
  • Seven settings ship: Material Quality, Detail Quality, Shadows, Anti-Aliasing, Improve Clarity, Bloom, Distortion, plus VSync. Improve Clarity is the interesting one — it sounds like a visibility aid, but it is a post-process sharpening pass that costs frames.
  • The research rejected 53 of 66 candidate settings. Every Engine.ini injection is gone — r.Fog, r.VolumetricFog, foliage/grass density, particle LOD, screen percentage. Those strip smoke and fog the menu won't let you disable. That's a visibility advantage, and it isn't going in your config file.
  • Every sg.* key found in "Valorant config packs" was rejected too — those are Unreal scalability keys copied out of Fortnite guides; Valorant doesn't read them. Texture Quality, UI Quality and Anisotropic Filtering were dropped as placebos after verification found no measurable frame cost.
  • "Multithreaded Rendering" and "Experimental Sharpening" were dropped because the key names every guide lists are invented and match nothing in a real config. The fullscreen fix was held back — Windowed Fullscreen genuinely costs latency, but the three keys interact and the naive fix was judged broken, so it gets its own pass rather than shipping half-right.
  • CS2 is not in this release. Its safety research was found on review to have reasoned from Valve's policy when the question needed Riot's, and there's no cs2_video.txt on a machine that has run CS2 — so its keys couldn't be checked against a real file. It ships when it can be verified, not before. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.13.0

  • The app had been advertising 152 optimizations since the catalog actually held 152. It holds 295. The wrong number appeared in seven places, including both pricing cards people were paying against.
  • The tier copy under it was worse: Free was described as 10 core optimizations when it is 93, and Plus as 40 — but 40 is what Plus adds on top of Free, for 133.
  • Every count in the UI is now derived from the catalog at runtime instead of typed in by hand, so it cannot drift again.
  • The site had the same rot: category chips still summed to 250, the tweak browser claimed 26 Privacy tweaks beside a card claiming 42, the "Latest version" tile read v6.1.0, and the roadmap promised v2.5— v3.0 while 6.12 was shipping. All corrected against the compiled catalog — the chips now sum to exactly 295.
  • One correction isn't cosmetic: the site sold Game Boost as a Pro feature, and it was never gated. Free and Plus users were being told to pay for something they already had. Game Boost is free on every tier; the gated feature is Deep Boost, on Plus. The plan matrix now matches what the code enforces, Mainframe included.
  • A second copy of the visual-effects bug — the Tools page still wrote only VisualFXSetting, the exact fault 6.12.1 fixed in the catalog. Both now call one shared implementation, so they can't drift apart again.
  • Fortnite: grass off, mouse acceleration off, the ray-tracing master switch and the audio-quality pair, plus an opt-in read-only lock that stops the game rewriting your config on exit.
  • Of the 26 Fortnite settings suggested, 13 were already applied and 7 were dead keys — misspellings like sg.PostProcessingQuality and sg.DesertQuality that Fortnite doesn't recognise. They were not added. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.12.2

  • The visual-effects tweak was writing every value correctly and Windows was ignoring all of them. 6.12.1 fixed which keys get written; this fixes whether they actually take effect.
  • Measured on a real machine right after applying: the registry read back exactly right — DragFullWindows 0, ListviewShadow 0, ListviewAlphaSelect 0, TaskbarAnimations 0, EnableAeroPeek 0 — while the live session, asked directly, still reported drag-redraw on, client-area animation on, UI effects on.
  • Explorer and DWM read those settings once at sign-in and cache them, so a registry write lands on disk and changes nothing you can see until the next reboot.
  • The tweak now calls SystemParametersInfo with SPIF_SENDCHANGE for each effect, applying it to the running session and broadcasting the change to open apps — so the animations stop the moment you click Apply.
  • No new tweaks and no new claims — the same 295 tweaks, one of which finally does what it always said it did. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.12.1

  • "Visual effects: best performance" was only doing half its job. It wrote VisualFXSetting=2 — which is what the radio button records, not what it does. Windows' own Performance Options dialog also writes each individual effect, so setting the master value alone left the effects running while everything reported "best performance".
  • Caught on a real machine: VisualFXSetting was 2 while window drag-redraw, list shadows, translucent selection and Aero Peek were all still on. Four effects running under a setting that claimed they were off.
  • It now applies the whole preset the way the dialog does — drag-redraw, list shadows, translucent selection, Aero Peek, menu and taskbar animations, and thumbnail generation.
  • Font smoothing is deliberately left alone. The Windows preset also kills ClearType, which makes text look terrible on an LCD for a gain you will never measure.
  • The standalone "don't redraw windows while dragging" tweak from 6.12.0 is gone — folded into this one rather than shipping two tweaks that write the same key. 295 tweaks, 93 free.

v6.12.0

  • The Windows Settings page is reorganised around what things actually do. It used to group by the deep-tweak categories, which scattered the performance settings across Power, Gaming and System, and lumped every visual choice in with Explorer behaviour.
  • Now: PERFORMANCE holds all 21 settings that cost or save you speed, APPEARANCE holds the 17 that change how Windows looks, EXPLORER holds the 8 that change how it behaves — then Privacy, Gaming, Security, Updates, Storage and Input.
  • Power mode: Best performance — the Windows 11 power slider. It's a separate control layered on top of your power plan, so picking a High Performance plan does not set it. Most guides miss this entirely.
  • Don't redraw windows while dragging and disable the scheduled defrag task — two more genuine performance settings that weren't covered.
  • Disable Memory Integrity (VBS) — the largest Windows-side gaming cost most machines still carry. It runs your kernel drivers inside a hypervisor to verify them, commonly costing 5-15% in CPU-bound games, and Windows 11 enables it by default. It's a real security trade-off, so it's cautioned, off by default, and Select all will never arm it.
  • 296 tweaks, 94 of them free. All four new performance settings are in the free tier.

v6.11.2

  • Fixed the interrupt-steering tweak skipping the most important device. It matched network cards on the words "Ethernet" or "Network Adapter" — which silently missed cards named things like Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller. On the machine this was built against, that Realtek NIC was the largest single source of the interrupt load the tweak exists to fix.
  • USB controllers were being steered correctly the whole time, so the tweak looked like it was working. It now also matches GbE, Gigabit, Realtek PCIe, Wireless, Wi-Fi, Killer and Intel I2xx names. If you already applied it, run it again and restart.
  • For scale: even while still missing the NIC, the tweak took CPU 0 from 29.67% DPC time down to 6.24%.

v6.11.1

  • NVIDIA Reflex added to the Fortnite profile — and a correction. The 6.11.0 notes said Boost was probably redundant on a CPU-bound machine. That was wrong. NVIDIA document Boost as being most effective precisely when you're CPU-bound, because that's exactly when the GPU idles down waiting on the CPU and then needs time to ramp back up.
  • It's written as a pair — bLatencyTweak1 and LatencyTweak2 — because the Boost value only means anything when the enable flag is set, and editing one alone leaves the incoherent state found in several third-party config packs. Skipped automatically on AMD and Intel, where the key is inert and the in-game option is hidden.
  • Honest scope: Reflex buys latency, not frame rate. It will not raise your FPS.
  • Fourteen other candidates were checked and rejected — motion blur, audio quality, HRTF, the latency flash indicator, show-FPS, lobby frame cap, anti-aliasing method, energy-saving keys and cosmetic streaming all turned out to be no-ops, folklore, or inert writes.
  • Replay recording has no config key at all. Rather than pretend it can switch it off, Astrix reports how much disk your replays use and points you at the in-game setting.

v6.11.0

  • The Tweaks page is now collapsible groups instead of a wall of chips. Every category is a dropdown — click it open and you get everything inside, with the header showing how many tweaks it holds, how many you've armed, how many are locked to your tier, and how many need arming individually.
  • Each group has its own Arm all and Clear, so you can take a whole area in one click without touching the rest. Like the global Select all, a group button will never arm a cautioned tweak.
  • Expand all / Collapse all at the top, your open groups are remembered between visits, and searching auto-opens whatever matched rather than hiding results behind another click.
  • New: a Fortnite frame rate cap — the single biggest lever for stable frametimes. A cap doesn't raise your floor, it lowers your ceiling, and that is exactly what "stable" means. Swinging 160-300 FPS is 3.33ms to 6.25ms per frame, and 2.9ms of variance is most of a whole 240Hz refresh interval, so frames land at inconsistent points in the scanout and read as microstutter even while the average looks excellent. Around 200 is a good balance; match your worst-case FPS for a completely flat line.
  • Astrix also now reports how much disk your saved Fortnite replays are using — replay recording writes continuously during every match. It reports, it doesn't delete: those are your recordings.

v6.10.0

  • The FPS check now measures DPC load per CPU core — and this is the one that explains stutter nobody can find. Deferred procedure calls preempt whatever is running on their core, so when they all pile onto one CPU, your game's render thread stalls every time it's scheduled there. It shows up as a frametime spike, never as a low average, which is why it survives every "optimizer" that only looks at FPS.
  • Measured on a real machine while gaming: CPU 0 at 29.67% DPC time and 6,872 per second, while every other core sat at 0.00% and about 100 per second. A 60x concentration on a single core.
  • New: steer network and USB interrupts off CPU 0 onto the top cores, and switch HD Audio controllers to MSI — measured with line-based interrupts while the GPU, NVMe and NIC were already on MSI. Both are cautioned and need a restart, because a bad outcome means a device stops working until you undo it.
  • New: protect the DirectX shader cache from Storage Sense, which sweeps it as a "temporary file". Fortnite ships no bundled shader cache, so the driver cache is the only thing making your second session smooth — deleting it forces every shader to recompile mid-match. That's not cleaning, that's manufacturing stutter.
  • For the same reason, two things Astrix will never do: auto-clear shader caches, or ship a RAM cleaner. Trimming working sets evicts the pipeline states Fortnite deliberately keeps resident, turning them back into slow driver-cache lookups mid-match.
  • 292 tweaks.

v6.9.0

  • Every Windows Settings tweak is now FREE — all 71 of them, plus all 15 bloatware removals and the core cleanup. 90 free tweaks. Charging for a one-click version of a toggle that's already sitting in the Windows Settings app isn't something worth charging for.
  • Plus adds 40 of the deep registry / kernel / driver tweaks (130 total) and unlocks Process Diet. Pro is the full 289 plus CPU / Scheduling and the Fortnite config.
  • Kill background no longer spares game launchers. Epic — including EpicWebHelper — Steam, EA, Ubisoft, Riot and GOG all get closed now. They're the background weight people actually want gone.
  • It still spares NVIDIA, Discord, the running game, anti-cheat (killing EAC or Vanguard mid-match can boot you or flag the session) and controller input services.
  • And your editor. A dry run against a live machine showed 14 claude.exe processes queued for termination — it would have closed the editor the user was working in. Development tools are now protected here the same way Process Diet already protected them.

v6.8.1

  • Fortnite is now its own section, not a card buried at the bottom of Game Boost. It's a nav item under TOOLS — and it's in the Reflex command palette too, so it's reachable on the default bar-less theme instead of only from the sidebar.
  • If Fortnite isn't installed yet the page says so, rather than silently not appearing and leaving you wondering where it went.
  • Same feature underneath, verified against a real config: 17 settings already optimal, 5 worth changing.

v6.8.0

  • New Fortnite section. It reads Fortnite's own GameUserSettings.ini, shows you which video settings are already optimal and which are worth changing, then writes the competitive set for you.
  • Sets 3D resolution 100%, view distance Near, anti-aliasing / shadows / global illumination / reflections off, post-processing / textures / effects / foliage / shading / landscape low, VSync and dynamic resolution off, Nanite off, multithreaded rendering on, low input latency on, unlimited frame rate, and Performance rendering mode.
  • It also catches Windowed Fullscreen, which most guides miss. Windowed Fullscreen composites through the desktop; true Fullscreen bypasses that and is measurably lower latency.
  • Your original config is backed up before anything is written, and Restore backup puts it back exactly. Fortnite must be closed, because it rewrites the file when it exits.
  • Scope, deliberately: only settings the in-game Video menu already exposes — which is why this carries no anti-cheat risk. Astrix will not edit Engine.ini. Stripping fog or foliage beyond what the menu allows is a visibility advantage Epic can treat as an exploit, and that isn't worth a ban for a couple of frames.

v6.7.1

  • Three additions, and an honest accounting. A 62-item scheduler / memory / GPU / network / input checklist was matched against the catalog first — 28 of the 31 verifiable items were already shipping, so only the genuine gaps got built. Re-implementing what's already there just inflates a number.
  • Memory diagnostic tasks off — the two MemoryDiagnostic scheduled tasks that periodically test RAM in the background. Genuine memory faults still surface through WHEA.
  • Real MTU optimization. It probes for the largest packet your connection carries without fragmenting and sets the adapter to match — and if it can't get a clean answer it changes nothing. Guessing an MTU number is how people break their own connection.
  • "Disable MPO" is back — as an explicit troubleshooting item, not a speed-up. It cures flickering and black-screen flashes on some setups, but it costs frames, so it's cautioned: Select all takes Restore MPO and never the one that costs you performance. Both directions now exist and can't fight each other.
  • Already covered, so not duplicated: core parking, priority separation, MMCSS, timer resolution, dynamic tick, power throttling, memory compression, standby clearing, NVIDIA telemetry, shader cache, Nagle, TCP ACK frequency, network throttling, DNS, Teredo, NIC power saving, mouse acceleration, USB selective suspend, keyboard repeat, background recording, OneDrive, Teams, Cortana, Edge, Widgets, Copilot, menu delay and automatic maintenance. NVIDIA overlay and standby-memory clearing already live in Process Diet and Game Boost.
  • Not built: "Nvidia driver debloat" means repackaging a driver installer, and "anti-cheat compatibility fixes" is too vague to implement as anything real. 289 tweaks.

v6.7.0

  • New FPS check on the Game Boost page. Tweaks don't create frame rate — they remove things that take it away. So rather than adding more switches, this reads the settings that genuinely cost frames and reports only what's actually wrong on your machine, with a one-click fix.
  • It catches: the large system cache trimming your game's memory, Multiplane Overlay left disabled, HPET forced on, foreground priority not favouring the active window, CPU reserved for background work — including the "set it to 0" trap where Windows clamps the value straight back to 20 — GPU scheduling off, Game DVR still recording, network throttling, and a non-performance power plan.
  • If nothing is wrong it says so plainly and tells you you're at your hardware's ceiling, instead of inventing work to look busy. That's the whole point: an optimizer that reports "nothing to do" is being honest, not useless.
  • Read-only until you press Fix, and every fix is reversible.

v6.6.4

  • No tweak in Astrix can make performance worse any more. The three that could are now either flipped to the helpful direction or gone entirely.
  • This update repairs the frame-rate drop by itself. Both replacements are on by default, so updating and running your tweaks undoes the damage — then restart.
  • "Large system file cache" → "Keep memory with apps, not the file cache". It used to write LargeSystemCache=1, biasing memory toward the disk cache and trimming a running game's working set. It now writes 0 — the direction that keeps memory with your applications.
  • "Disable Multiplane Overlay" → "Restore Multiplane Overlay". Turning MPO off is a popular flicker fix, but it hands composition work back to the GPU and costs frames. Astrix now puts it back.
  • "Force HPET on" is deleted. Forcing the High Precision Event Timer is slower than the default TSC on every modern CPU. A knob whose best case is "no worse" has no business in a performance tool — a description warning people off it wasn't enough, as Select-all proved.
  • "Disable synthetic timers" is deleted too — it ran bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock, the exact same command as "Prefer the CPU TSC clock". A duplicate under a second name is just padding the count.
  • 286 tweaks, down from 288. The number going down is the point.

v6.6.3

  • "Select all" no longer arms tweaks that can cost you something. A user hit Select all, restarted, and their frame rate halved — from 300 to 160. The culprit was Large system file cache (LargeSystemCache), a server-oriented setting that biases memory toward the file cache and trims application working sets. Its own description said "not for gaming" and it was off by default, but Select all took it anyway — and because it's reboot-gated, the damage only showed up after the next restart.
  • 23 tweaks are now flagged as cautioned, and Select all skips every one: the ones that can make performance worse (large system cache, forced HPET, MPO off, platform-tick changes), the advanced GPU interrupt work that can need Safe Mode to undo, the security trade-offs, and anything that takes hardware away — printing, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, smart cards.
  • You can still arm any of them individually. That's the entire point: a setting that costs you something has to be a deliberate choice, not a side effect of one click. Each page now shows how many it skipped.
  • If your FPS dropped after a Select all: set LargeSystemCache to 0 under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management and restart.

v6.6.2

  • The TOOLS sidebar item is now called Game Boost instead of "Games", matching the page it actually opens.
  • Fixed navigation that had quietly fallen behind. Reflex is the default theme and it's bar-less, so its NAV command palette is the only way to move around — and the palette had never been updated as pages were added. Process Diet, the NVIDIA Control Panel settings and the Windows Settings page were all unreachable for anyone on the default theme. The palette now carries every destination (28) plus all 12 tweak categories, and no longer lists Dashboard, which was removed in v6.
  • The sidebar, the command palette and the re-render path now share a single navigation dispatch. Previously each had its own copy, which is exactly how a page ends up reachable from one route and missing from another — and how the re-render path was rendering an empty tweak list for pages like Hardware and Processes.

v6.6.1

  • Fixed a tweak that did nothing. "Maximize system responsiveness" set SystemResponsiveness=0. Microsoft's MMCSS documentation is explicit: "Values below 10 and above 100 are clamped to 20." So 0 silently landed back on the Windows default — the tweak had no effect on any machine that ran it, including ours. It now sets 10, the real minimum, reserving just 10% of CPU for background work and leaving 90% to games. The "set it to 0" advice repeated across guides and videos is simply wrong.
  • Removed a tweak rather than ship it. An MMCSS audio-latency tweak was prototyped and dropped: Windows sets the Audio task to Background Only with a Medium category deliberately — background tasks keep their priority when window focus changes, which is what you want for audio — and Pro Audio is already High. The remaining knobs are dead: Microsoft documents SFIO Priority as "not used" and Clock Rate's guarantee as removed back in Windows 7.
  • Two tweaks honestly relabelled as repairs. The Games MMCSS profile tweaks write Windows' own shipped defaults, so on a clean install they change nothing. They're now called Repair games task scheduling and Repair games GPU priority, because their real job is undoing a profile that another "optimizer" mangled.
  • 288 tweaks — one fewer than 6.6.0, on purpose. A tweak that only looks like it works is worse than no tweak.

v6.6.0

  • 32 new tweaks — 289 total. Every one fills a genuine gap rather than restating something already in the catalog.
  • Processor idle & boost: idle demotion and promotion off, autonomous mode off, and aggressive boost mode so clocks ramp sooner and hold longer. Plus SATA link power saving off, so drives don't stall waking from HIPM/DIPM.
  • A full NIC offload sweep: Energy Efficient and Green Ethernet, flow control, ARP and NS offload, Large Send Offload — and bigger receive/transmit buffers. No-ops safely on adapters that don't expose a given property.
  • TCP stack: Chimney Offload and ECN off, faster retransmit timeout, and a longer ARP cache to cut LAN broadcasts.
  • Ten more background services — IP Helper, Font Cache, WebClient, BranchCache, Function Discovery, UPnP Host, Offline Files, push notifications, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi for cabled machines.
  • Explorer: thumbnail previews, Aero Peek, frequent folders, Windows sounds and the first sign-in animation. Plus platform-tick and HPET switches for A/B latency testing.
  • Not included, deliberately. The BIOS items — PBO, curve optimizer, C-state control, PPT/TDC/EDC, load-line calibration, Infinity Fabric, RAM timings, Resizable BAR, Above 4G — are firmware settings. Windows cannot set them at all, and any tool claiming to is either lying or shipping a kernel driver.
  • Also not included: the Defender-weakening items (disable cloud protection, sample submission, scheduled scans, SmartScreen, controlled folder access). Astrix ships tweaks that enable SmartScreen and PUA protection — shipping their opposites would make your PC measurably less safe for no frame-rate gain.

v6.5.0

  • Game Boost gains a CPU / Scheduling section — the techniques behind Process Lasso, ParkControl and QuickCPU, implemented natively. No bundled third-party binaries, no drivers.
  • ProBalance — when a background process sustains heavy CPU it's dropped one priority notch so it stops stealing time from whatever you're using, and handed straight back the moment it settles. Nothing is ever closed, and everything is restored when you switch it off.
  • Game priority — your focused game runs at High and returns to Normal when you alt-tab away.
  • Permanent per-game rules for CPU, I/O and memory priority, written to the executable's Image File Execution Options — Windows' own mechanism — so they survive reboots and apply the instant the game launches, with no agent running in the background.
  • Unpark all cores, pin the CPU against aggressive downclocking, and unhide the power settings Windows keeps out of the Power Options UI.
  • Deliberately not offered: Realtime priority. It outranks kernel mouse and keyboard handling and can wedge a machine hard enough to need a power cycle — High is the top of the genuinely useful range.

v6.4.0

  • Fixed: updating no longer resets you to Free. The licence key was written to astrix.cfg inside the versioned app folder — exactly the folder the updater deletes when it installs a new build. It now lives one level up in the container, where updates can't reach it, and the launcher rescues any existing key on the way past so you only have to activate once more.
  • New Windows Settings page — the catalog is now split by surface: 71 things you could also change in the Windows Settings app get their own page, so the Tweaks tab holds only the 186 registry, kernel, driver and service tweaks you genuinely can't do from Settings.
  • Real NVIDIA Control Panel control. These aren't registry keys — they live in NVIDIA's binary driver profile database — so Astrix writes them through NVAPI's own settings API: power management (prefer max performance), texture filtering (high performance), vertical sync off, triple buffering off, threaded optimization on, highest refresh rate, and unlimited shader cache. Restore defaults reverts exactly those settings and never touches your per-game profiles.
  • Honest omission: Low Latency Mode: Ultra is not included. Its setting IDs appear in a single third-party database, are absent from every NVIDIA-authored source, and NVIDIA have stated it isn't modifiable through the API — so rather than ship a guess that silently writes to the wrong key, set that one by hand.
  • 7 new tweaks (257 total) — Xbox Game Bar overlay off, background game recording off, audio latency via the MMCSS Audio/Pro Audio profiles, cleaner Alt+Tab (no Edge tabs), Chrome background-mode and auto-update debloat, and one-click disable of bloat startup apps.

v6.3.0

  • New Process Diet — a real fix for a bloated process count, on the Processes page. Windows hands every shared service its own svchost.exe once you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM, which is why a modern PC runs 80+ of them; Astrix groups them back together for roughly 40 fewer processes after a restart.
  • Also disables verified-safe background services (vendor updaters, inventory & health telemetry, Storage Spaces, scanners), stops Discord / Epic / Edge / Medal / G HUB auto-starting at login, and reaps the idle Search host and its WebView2 tree.
  • A guard holds the floor at your chosen target, re-arming itself every launch — with a 30s cadence, a warm-up delay, a per-cycle cap and a circuit breaker so it never fights the OS.
  • Allow-list only. Your browser, games and editors are never touched, and neither are the shell processes that only look idle — killing ApplicationFrameHost loses unsaved work in open apps, and ShellHost takes the taskbar with it. Both are permanently off-limits.
  • New Preview shows exactly which processes would be closed and why every other one is spared — nothing is killed until you say so.
  • New Undo restores every service to the exact start mode it had beforehand, re-enables the startup entries and reverts grouping.
  • Honest note: grouping reclaims only ~150-250 MB. It's a process-count change, not a speed-up, and we'd rather say so than sell it as one.

v6.2.0

  • 250 real tweaks — up from 197. 53 new, each one researched and adversarially verified as genuine documented Windows behavior, safe and reversible. No placebos, no filler.
  • A large batch of service & scheduled-task disables that actually reduce your running-process count — Geolocation, Biometric, Smart Card, Phone, Payments/NFC, Wallet, AllJoyn, Parental Controls, Mobile Hotspot, Insider, Touch Keyboard, Link Tracking, Retail Demo, Downloaded Maps, Media Player sharing, and the Print Spooler; plus Autochk/Kernel-CEIP/Feedback/Error-Reporting/Office/Edge-update/device-census scheduled tasks
  • New Explorer & interface wins — remove web/Bing results from Search, block auto-installed promo apps, fully disable Widgets, faster keyboard repeat, faster hover & taskbar-thumbnail reveal, full path in the title bar, auto-expanding nav pane, hide 'Recently added'
  • More privacy master-switches — CEIP off, feedback notifications off, handwriting-data sharing off, block sites reading your language list, and instant-foreground-focus / auto-end-hung-tasks performance tweaks
  • Every non-speed category is back in the Tweaks grid (Privacy, Interface, Security, Cleanup, Updates, Bloatware) — 12 categories total
  • The Hardware page now renders clean spec rows — CPU, cores/threads, base clock, L2/L3 cache, GPU + driver, resolution & refresh, motherboard, BIOS, full memory config and OS build

v6.1.0

  • New boxy Tweaks grid — every optimization as a square, click-to-arm chip in multi-column category blocks
  • Redesigned Reflex look — bar-less, with dead-square blocks, glowing neon-cyan borders and a full-screen command palette; now the default
  • Advanced performance tweaks — the library reached 197, every one researched and adversarially verified: kernel timer/tick, TSC-over-HPET, svchost grouping, NTFS + memory-manager tuning, GPU interrupt priority and more
  • New Astrix Plan maximum-performance power plan, a Kill background button on Processes, and 0.5 ms timer resolution held while the app runs
  • New in-app updates, Compact mode, blurrier frosted glass, and everything follows your accent colour
  • Game Boost rebuilt — Deep Boost multi-pass RAM reclaim, live VRAM monitor, Browser Memory Saver and game-library detection

v2.4

  • Rebuilt on WinUI 3 with genuine acrylic glass — a true Windows 11 look
  • 13 color themes (Light, Dark, Ocean, Sunset, Forest, Rose and more) with iOS-style toggles
  • Redesigned, centered layout — bigger toggles, expanded Settings, polished title bar
  • Fully self-contained & portable — unzip and run, no .NET/runtime to install
  • More themes, smoother live dashboard, stronger licensing

v2.3

  • Live dashboard — real CPU / GPU / RAM / disk usage that matches Task Manager
  • 80 real tweaks (5 new) across 9 categories
  • Scrollable sidebar, expanded settings, Performance Mode switch
  • Installs as a real app (Start Menu + Apps & Features) with one-time license keys
  • Faster, all-background metric sampling — no UI lag, smooth window drag

v2.2

  • Game Boost — real RAM freeing & background-process trimming (Pro)
  • Bloatware removal including Edge — free for everyone
  • Lighter, cleaner UI

v2.1

  • New dashboard layout and dark scrollbars
  • Added Updates & Security categories
  • Machine-bound license keys

v1.7

  • Grew to 75 tweaks, 9 categories
  • In-app update check
  • Three tiers: Free / Plus / Pro with unique keys

v1.0

  • First release — real, documented Windows tweaks, no placebos
  • Restore point + activity log + dark UI