Our Download of the Day today is Xfire 1.141 Build 44773.

Xfire is a free tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. It works regardless of game type, server browser, or gaming service that a player is using.

Xfire combines instant messaging, a server browser, peer-to-peer file downloads, in-game messaging, screenshot and video capture and one of the most active gaming communities in the world into a small, simple package. Best of all, it's free!

The latest version includes the following changes:

Changes in Version 1.141 Build 44773

- Removed a bunch of old and unused DX9 clean-up code that stopped the correct unhooking of functions in DX10/DX11. This resolved some crashes that occurred in WoW and other games on exit when resources were not correctly cleaned up.

- Added some new failsafe hooking checks and debug logging to ensure that hooks do not get attempted until they have passed another layer of sanity checks.

- Changed the hooks used for DX10 & DX11 to use ResizeBuffers instead of ClearState. A large range of games called ClearState many times per frame, which would result in a huge fps drop because it would clear all devices and bitmaps and they would need to be recreated every frame. Also ResizeBuffers is the new way in DX10/DX11 to know when the screen size changes. Without this hook, newer DX11 games were crashing on re-size or switching to Fullscreen mode.

- Added another layer of protection in the get screen size function to stop crashes that occurred when resizing certain games.

- Fixed a memory leak where the DX10 sprite proxy was never being cleaned up when exiting.

- Fixed an issue in DX10 where screenshots and video were not displaying the XIG interface because the sprites were not correctly getting flushed to the GPU.

- Fixed an issue where DX10 & DX11 games that used multi-sampled (anti-aliasing) back buffer would always result in black screenshots and video capture.

- Added full support for R10G10B10A2 back buffer format which fixed black screenshots and video capturing for any games that use that buffer format.

- Optimized the loop logic that grabs the pixels in the back buffer for all buffer formats. This was needed because some games were dropping to 15 fps (or less) when video capturing occurred.

- Changed the core DX11 render logic to use our own render target view instead of depending on the the render target view the game left us. This fixed a lot of games (Deus Ex, Dirt 3, Civ 5, etc) where the XIG windows would not render at all because the render target views were either cleared or left in an unusable state.

- Tweaked rendering support for: World of Warcraft, Bioshock 1 & 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Civilization 5, DiRT 3, Homefront, Dragon Age II, Red Fraction: Guerrilla, Dungeons & Dragons Online

- Enabled auto-login by default

- Enabled Broadcasting by default