ReShade For Windows Overview
The ReShade program is mainly used by gamers around the world in order to improve graphics in games written under one of the three most common graphics APIs – OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan. However, the utility is able to work with video players, allowing the user to fine-tune the video display settings. The program has another purpose – the creation of its own shader.
ReShade Usage For Gamers
With the help of ReShade in the graphic component of the games, you can implement and/or customize, for example, environmental occlusion or effects of the real depth of field, perform color correction at your own discretion, and much more. ReShade provides an automated universal way to access both color and depth information, providing the user with all the necessary tools to configure these and a number of other parameters.
The utility allows you to add advanced SMAA anti-aliasing based on depth edge detection, screen ambient occlusion, depth of field effects, chromatic aberration, dynamic film grain, automatic saturation and color correction, cross-processing, multi-pass blur, and many other visual effects.
The key point is that for the program it does not matter whether the game developers provide these visual effects or not. And if they are provided, it does not matter whether they can be configured or not. An injector is an injector to implement into the software what is not there initially or to manually configure something that cannot be initially configured.
ReShade Usage For Game Developers
The ReShade program is also used by independent developers of computer games with the same goal – to improve graphics, add visual effects, etc. Basically, we are talking about indie games created with the help of free game engines by small teams or even one developer. The utility has also found application among the developers of game mods (unofficial modifications) – moderators.
ReShade has its own shading language and transcompiler called ReShade FX. The syntax is based on HLSL and adds useful functions designed to develop post-processing effects: defining and using textures directly from shader code, rendering them, changing rendering states, retrieving color and depth data, and querying custom values such as timers or key states.
It is worth noting that the shaders created in the program will work everywhere, regardless of which API is used by the game – Direct3D or OpenGL: ReShade will simply compile for the correct model and shader language.
How To Use ReShade?
Work with the program ReShade is carried out in two stages (if it is used by gamers):
Setting the graphic effects of interest to the gamer in the folder with the game (after launching, the program will offer to select the executable EXE file of the game).
Activation of the installed effects (by default, the activation occurs automatically when the game starts) and their adjustment, for which an overlay is used, which is displayed on the screen only in the game itself after the user presses a certain key combination.
Regarding graphic effects. Almost each of them has their own settings, but for ordinary users, they are too complex to understand. Therefore, it is easier to use presets, which can be found on various thematic forums on the network. The presets are simply copied to the game folder, and that’s it.
Users can also expand the number of effects in reShade by downloading ZIP archives from the Internet via a direct URL link.
