Version 0.5.0 is
now available in Early Access on Patreon for 30 Days! Get it now and support the further development of the plugin.
Primary focus for this version was stability and performance, then features. And with that said, there have been a lot of stability and performance improvements to this version. The biggest change is that the plugin should now work on future versions of OBS Studio as long as the linked graphics layer does not change too much. Right after that come a lot of stability improvements and leak fixes which aren't in 0.5.0pr3. On to the actual changes:
A new filter was added called "Signed Distance Effects" which allows you to draw a Shadow inside or outside of a transparent source. It is a cheaper alternative to the usual blurred shadows, but not quite as fast when it comes to catching up with the changes in the source. Do keep in mind that this shadow is limited to the actual size of the source, so you will need to use the Crop/Pad filter to expand the source if you wish to extend it past the boundary of the source.
Then there is the Blur Filter, which has received a much needed GPU usage reduction and it should now work better on low power GPUs and cause less impact on games. Primarily this was achieved through caching the blur results and reducing the number of texture accesses, which should make Studio Mode possible on some GPUs again. Additionally it now supports masking with various input types, allowing you to do things like
dynamically updating the area behind an overlay that ends up blurred, however this has no impact on GPU usage as the blur is still calculated for the entire source.
The 3D Transform Filter should also no longer cause squishing if the source size was changed, and now supports Mipmapping if OBS Studio is using Direct3D 11. With Mipmapping you can keep your rotated or scaled chat more readable instead of it resulting in heavy aliasing. It will also now cache the result of the transformation, which should further reduce rendering cost.
And as the last change there is Source Mirror. It can now mirror Video and Audio data, rescale the video data properly and should no longer crash on exit due to leaking sources, which means you can now use it with Video Capture Sources like Capture Cards.
Unfortunately Custom Shaders are not yet ready for a release and have been removed for the time being. The code just wasn't working as planned and it just didn't support the necessary stuff to work right. A new design is being worked on and should be ready in the near future.