Depth buffer disables on low fps

A good morning and a happy new year to everyone!

So I've recently starting to use ReShade on Lord of the Rings Online, which works splendidly and even supports Depth Buffer access if you disable the ingame MSAA. However, I seem to have a problem where ReShade's depth buffer features such as AO and DOF would just disable if the frames drop below a certain threshold (around 15fps) I think.

Since my GPU is a lot better then my CPU (if you can even compare those two components, but you'll get what I mean ) my frames hardly drop at all, maybe about 3-4 fps max, when using ReShade. However when entering towns, my frames just go to sh*t, since my CPU can't really handle all the stuff going on too well.

Anyways, I was wondering if there was an inbuilt feature to ReShade that turns off depth effects under a certain fps? If so, where can I disable that? Or does this have nothing to do with ReShade itself and is probably somehow caused by the game itself?

Thank you very much and btw, your tool is simply amazing

traceless91 wrote: Anyways, I was wondering if there was an inbuilt feature to ReShade that turns off depth effects under a certain fps? If so, where can I disable that? Or does this have nothing to do with ReShade itself and is probably somehow caused by the game itself?

ReShade does not disable depth effects on low FPS, it does however disable depth access when excessive network traffic is detected. This is done to prevent cheating, since access to the depth buffer can give an unfair advantage in multiplayer games (drawing outlines around objects etc.).
Since you are talking about an online game, this is likely to be the case here, as entering towns with other players (and thus increased network traffic), will cause ReShade to stop sending scene depth information to the shaders.

Ah, that would probably be the case then. I'm pretty sure you've hardcoded this behaviour on purpose then and there is no way I can disable it?

Correct.

Even if I would like it to be possible, I perfectly understand why you did it the way it is. So thanks for explaining

Well, @crosire .. I don't know, this seems like a strange and hindering feature. If it really was that important to devs for players to not hack, the developers would've implemented a injection-protection. I mean, I do not support hacking, but we should not be limited only because devs aren't smart enough to make a proper anti-cheat. Something like this really shouldn't be in a shader-application, in my opinion.

Think about categories for 3rd party tools used in online games:

Low Threat

Medium Threat

High Threat

Lets assume that ReShade is currently between low and medium threat because it does not allow abuse as a cheating tool. Therefore, companies might not flag it as a reason to ban people for using it.
However, if depth buffer access would easily work in online games, ReShade would certainly be considered high threat cause it can easily be used as a cheating tool. Then anyone who could have used it before as a tool without the depth buffer access in online game would get banned or would have to decide not to use it, just in case.

I hope you get the dilemma

I understand, but they could just deactivate depth access, if they didn't want players to use it to cheat via programs like ReShade?

There is no comfortable game API that allows Deph Buffer access. ReShade is trying to locate and extract depth information when used in a game itself. To stop ReShade from getting this information, the game would also need to stop using the depth buffer in its render pipeline and therefore deactivate all of its dependent effects.

You could compare this to:
Throwing away your money to prevent thieves from steeling it

Games absolutly require depth for rendering. How else is 3D rendering supposed to work if you only have 2 dimensions? You need that third dimension in order to sort objects, etc. This is not something games can deactivate and even if it was, it's ReShade's job to make sure it is not misused, and definitly not the job of the game developer.

There are some games where the Depth Buffer doesn't work. So there is some way to prevent access to the depth buffer? Not saying that they should throw away the depth buffer, I am aware that it is needed for 3D and.. Fine.. Nevermind, if you feel like this is the right choice.. .-.

No. These are games ReShade's depth buffer detection algorithm does not produce any good result in. They don't do anything activly to prevent ReShade from grabbing it. There is no generic API solution for global depth storage afterall. So ReShade has to do a lot of guesswork, which is not always guaranteed to work.