FULL GPU CONTROL
Change how your games look with ReShade
AS PC USERS, WE’RE PRETTY LUCKY. Virtually every game gives us options. We can customize our control scheme, we can mess with config files, and we can adjust graphical performance, often to the most minute degree. Try doing that on a console. But let’s face it: Sometimes those options aren’t enough. We’ve invested in high-end graphics cards that can cost more than a decent used car, so we should be able to abuse them in any way we see fit. That’s where ReShade comes in. It’s a post-processing injector, meaning it sneaks its way in between your game and your graphics card’s final render to screen, enabling you to add your own effects and shaders to the eventual output.
Want to add depth of field to an older game? Sure, why not? Want to tweak the colors of a dim game and brighten it up? You can do that while adding little to no performance overhead. Want to use ray tracing in a game that wouldn’t otherwise support it? Even that is (sort of) possible with Pascal Gilcher’s experimental global illumination shader, available through
www.patreon.com/mcflypg. The only thing ReShade can’t do is improve gaming graphics while running on integrated hardware—you need to upgrade for that.
1 THROW SOME SHADE
It’s important to note that we’re not running ReShade on any kind of ludicrous hardware—our test machine here is a lowly Core i5-4590 with an affordable bus-powered Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti on board. Only the latter is really tested, given that ReShade is mostly GPU-bound, but it’s going to mean you asking slightly more of your hardware, and just how much extra processing it demands depends on the particular shader you employ. That said, you might actually be able to improve performance if you switch out certain in-game rendering options for ReShade’s more efficient post-processing shaders. Switch off antialiasing, for instance, and instead pour on some FXAA after the fact, and you may well discover an extra lick of speed.
>> Let’s begin by getting ReShade installed. It’s not a traditional program, or even a traditional driver, and you don’t install it in the same way. Instead, you need to individually apply ReShade to each game you want to use it with. This makes sense: You might not want to use the same collection of shaders on one game as you do on another, and indeed you might not want ReShade layered on every single game. It’s not difficult: Download the setup tool from http://reshade.me and save it somewhere safe, as you need to run it for each game you want to tweak. Run it, hit the button, and find the game you want to tweak—by default, it opens the “steamapps/common” folder on your boot drive, so dig into the appropriate folder, and select the executable of the game.
2 VERSION OPTIONS
Next, select whether your game uses Direct3D 9, Direct3D 10+, or OpenGL—if you don’t know which option to choose, check out ReShade’s compatibility guide at http://reshade.me/compatibility. If your game isn’t there, opt for D3D10+ and reinstall later if it’s incorrect. ReShade can only work with games using D3D9 or above, because it literally intercepts calls made to the rendering API. If you’re trying to jazz up something older (such as, for example, the earlier 3D GTA titles, which use Direct3D 8), you need to grab the d3d8to9 wrapper from the tab at the top of http://reshade.me, and drop it in the root folder of your game. Want to go even earlier? Direct3D 7 and above aren’t supported, but some games have had their own API upgrades in the intervening years. If there’s a D3D11 version, use that.
3 CHOICES, CHOICES
At this point, you’re offered the opportunity to download a collection of standard effects [ Image A]. These are, although sometimes a little behind the curve in terms of their development, pretty decent, and they cover a broad range, so we recommend clicking “Yes” and downloading these to start—we’ll extend ReShade’s abilities with a selection of more complex shaders later. You’re given the option to select which to install; while ReShade suggests picking as few as possible, we encourage you to go crazy this first time, and install all of them, because they can be enabled and disabled at will. Once the ReShade window switches to “Edit ReShade settings,” you’re ready to go: You can launch your game as normal. You’ll know ReShade has installed correctly if you see a new overlay appear along the top of your game.
4 LAYER IT ON
Hit Home on your keyboard, and ReShade pulls mouse focus from your game, and automatically starts a tutorial. Step through it until you click “Finish.” You’re now ready to apply your first shader. But which
will it be? Realistically, that’s up to you. The default pack includes a number of shaders that aren’t of much practical use, although they’re rather artistic, but there are a few that can produce some impressive effects. Take your pick; flick one on by checking its box, and you should see the effect immediately. If it’s not strong enough, start playing with the sliders in the lower part of the ReShade interface; you can always revert to the original settings by clicking the button at the top. Hit Home to give focus back to your game, and close the ReShade menu.
>> ReShade’s filters work top-down, in layers. If you enable more than one, you may wish to sensibly reorder them by dragging them in the list. Obviously, the specific order depends on the specific filters you’re using, but in general you’ll want to put ambient occlusion filters first, sharpening next, antialiasing third, and any color tweaks last on the list. That’s the logical order, at least, but it’s going to be a process of experimentation to find the one that works best for your game.
5 FIGHTING FRAMES
With a few filters installed, you may find your frame rate dropping slightly. Even the order those shaders run in can have a big impact on performance. But to see what they’re really doing, you need to head to ReShade’s “Statistics” tab. The top of it shows your current FPS and, notably, the time each frame has taken to render—if this goes up, the former goes down. Below, click “Show only active techniques,” and you can see statistics on just what impact each of your shaders is having, with a live update of the time they’ve added to each frame render, and the number of passes each takes. But that’s not all—many shaders show you exactly what they’re rendering if you hover over one of their layers. Double-click one, and you can pop it out in a window of its own, giving you an overlaid peek into the inner workings of ReShade.
6 WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Some shaders also have a debug mode. Try, for instance, enabling SMAA, and using the dropdown box at the bottom of its settings panel to switch on “View edges”—you see only the edges it detects (and antialiases) drawn on screen, giving you the chance both to refine the rest of its settings with a visual indicator of what’s going on and to play any game as though it’s an awkwardly colored analog of the old wireframe Star
Wars arcade game. >> Debug options can also be handy if you’re having problems with certain shaders. If, for example, depth-based shaders such as MartyMcFlyDOF aren’t functioning, enable the DisplayDepth shader, and set its “present type” function to “Vertical 50/50” to see the
detected normal map and depth map on screen [ Image B]. If this is blank, it’s likely that access to the depth buffer is blocked—see the “Multiplayer Madness” boxout for clues as to why that might be. Alternatively, you may need to let ReShade know exactly which layer is the correct depth buffer to use. With DisplayDepth activated, head over to the “DX11” tab (or “DX9/DX10”) and change which buffer is used; if you see a multicolored, untextured approximation of your game pop up, you can now safely disable DisplayDepth and work with whatever shaders you like.
7
A SAMPLE SELECTION
Let’s quickly compare a game with and without ReShade effects by gussying up Grid2, which is impressivelooking but, given its age, not the most demanding game on modern hardware. We’ve turned everything up to maximum, but switched off antialiasing and ambient occlusion in its in-game settings panel, in order to let ReShade do that work for us— Grid2 has a tendency to look a little soft even without its built-in filters [ Image C], so it’s a good choice for tweaking.
>> The first thing to enable is MXAO, ensuring the correct depth buffer is used by enabling the debug view, and selecting the appropriate one on the “DX11” tab. Dragging the amount slider gives us the option to select just how gloomy we want our dusky image to become. Next, a little sharpening: Drag the LumaSharpen shader below MXAO, and use its “Show sharpening pattern” setting to see its results. Adjust it until the game is suitably crispy—this gives the SMAA filter, which you should put next in the list, some good edges to smooth out. Next, we’d add the excellent MagicBloom filter, followed by Vibrance, and FilmGrain2, just for a little class. The effect ups the realism of the image [ Image D], but it’s not without its drawbacks: It dropped the frame rate of our sample location from 112 to 56, mainly thanks to the numerous frame passes required by MagicBloom, SMAA, and MXAO. Unless you’re running some prodigious hardware, the same will happen to you.
8
SAVING SETTINGS
You’ve tinkered and tweaked. You’ve dragged sliders and set things just so. Helpfully, ReShade includes a preset system, which enables you to back up your settings and reload them at a later time—or even grab presets from folks online who’ve already done the tinkering for you. To save your current settings, open up the ReShade menu with Home, and click the plus sign at the top—give a name to your new preset, and you’re saved. You can switch between different presets by clicking the arrows to the left of the preset name.
>> And so to precompiled presets. Before we start playing with these, head over to http://github.com/
martymcmodding/qUINT and download Pascal Gilcher’s quintessential shader pack, a selection of highly refined shaders. Find the shader folder in whatever game you’re going to use it on, and drop the six files from qUINT’s shader folder in there—alternatively, you can put them in their own folder, and add them to ReShade’s list via “Settings/Effect Search Paths.” If you do the latter, hit “Reload” at the bottom of the ReShade menu to add them to the list.
9
BETTER PRESETS
With all the prerequisites lined up, head to http:// stormshade. otakumouse. com/preset/photo
realism-v3-0 and download the preset there, just as an example. It’s a shader specifically built for Final
Fantasy14, and one that’s not specifically geared toward gaming, meaning it might look a little awful to start with—disable Mode1 and Mode2, and switch off ADOF, however, and you should end up with a pretty vibrant picture [ Image E].
>> Each game behaves differently—so you’ll probably want to pull in a preset designed for the game you’re trying to play, rather than cludging one through. Head to
http://reshade.me/presets to see the database. Bear in mind that, if the dumpster fire of classic web coding on show here didn’t previously clue you in, many of these are old. They’re predominantly suited for ReShade’s predecessor SweetFX, though that doesn’t mean they’re
completely unusable. You may (may) have some success porting these over to ReShade using TransMod ( https://bit.ly/30T14dJ)— really, it’s just a case of relabeling a few things in the config file, as many of the shaders in ReShade expect the same parameters and values, it’s just the layout of the preset file that’s changed.
10 SHADY ANNOYANCES
ReShade, it’s fair to say, often doesn’t play nice. Depth of field effects, in particular, rarely work as well as they should; we’d have brought you a guide to applying the seemingly excellent MartyMcFlyDOF shader, or its more developed successor qUINT_ ADOF, had we not spent nearly a full day fighting with both, and eventually throwing in the towel. You, like us, will either need to put in a lot of time and effort getting things just so, or (when you’re tired of banging your head against your keyboard) stick to lower-level effects that don’t rely on the z-axis to function properly. Improve the color of your games, add beautiful bloom, sharpen those edges, and call it a day—often your games’ built-in effects are far better than you would be able to achieve through ReShade anyway.
>> Specific documentation for ReShade is sparse at best, but the forums at http://reshade.me/forum are a good place to head if you’re having any particular problems, want to learn more about its workings, or are on the lookout for the latest shaders. It might also help to read up a little about techniques such as ambient occlusion, antialiasing, and so on, so you know what you’re really doing when you drag those sliders.