ReShade Sharpen VS NVidia Sharpen VS AMD Sharpen?

Are there comparisons? Can ReShade include a sharpening filter comparable to the one AMD and/or NVidia uses?

MonarchX wrote: Are there comparisons? Can ReShade include a sharpening filter comparable to the one AMD and/or NVidia uses?

Hardware Unboxed has some pretty good comparison videos


The second vid is a followup to the first going over updates to nvidia's sharpening.

There is this perfect comparison web page, which belongs to another forum user I believe.

"Here is the link"

My personal favorite is Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen. Considering we need sharpening mostly after a strong Anti-Aliasing application there is no need to introduce some of the aliasing back. Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen does exactly that! It sharpens the picture without introducing any other aliasing.

AMD's Contrast Adaptive Sharpen and Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen may be the best in that regard.

canceralp wrote: There is this perfect comparison web page, which belongs to another forum user I believe.

"Here is the link"

My personal favorite is Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen. Considering we need sharpening mostly after a strong Anti-Aliasing application there is no need to introduce some of the aliasing back. Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen does exactly that! It sharpens the picture without introducing any other aliasing.

AMD's Contrast Adaptive Sharpen and Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen may be the best in that regard.

Actually after a little bit of testing I would say that good old Adaptive Sharpen can look a little softer than Contrast Adaptive Sharpen (less jagged edges and bright halos in my pictures). So AS, CAS and FAS would be the best here. Smart Sharpen is also a nice choice.

I never got to learn how to "tame" Adaptive Sharpen. It is always too strong. And once the sharpening is overdone, the depth is gone. It feels like a 2D artistic photograph, nothing like the expected realism.

Plus, Adaptive Sharpen is taking as much time as SMAA, even longer while other sharpening tools take only quarter of it.

Smart Sharp is very good, though.

I've mostly been using filmic though the anamorphic depth version could be useful if the game has a stable depth buffer, smart got quite a overhaul recently too incorporating AMD's CAS and then changing through several updates though it had a bit of a performance hit last I tested it although lately it's mostly been Division 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey which are also quite GPU demanding. (Can't use the newer compiled ReShade 3.4.x versions in Division 2 due to EAC either though it seems fairly irrelevant for D3D11 and more focused on D3D12, Win7D3D12 recently and Vulkan.)

Pending as a pull request for ReShade's shaders for now.
github.com/crosire/reshade-shaders/pulls

But can also be gotten from here along with the regular version of filmic which doesn't use the depth buffer for when that's not an option.
github.com/Fubaxiusz/fubax-shaders/tree/master/Shaders
(Network activity, issues with the game or other quirks.)

Smart's over here and is updated fairly often from the looks of things.
github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/tree/master/Shaders
( github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/commits/master )

I haven't used it as much although with some tweaking and tuning it can probably be quite good plus it has some enhancements as well for enhancing other bits.

Mostly prefer a very light sharpen effect to minimize graininess and the white or haloing or artifacts or how to describe them so that usually means dialing the strength way down slightly enhancing the image but without the associated issues and then newer fun problems like temporal stability and wonkiness.
(SMAA does quite a number on image stability if TAA's in effect as it turns out and it's not always easy to undo TAA or it has severe drawbacks because the game kinda needed that to look remotely normal or not-broken. )


Epic levels of downsampling to the degree of 200% minimum 400% recommended wouldn't hurt either but that sort of GPU just doesn't exist yet.
(At 2560x1440 and 2x2 or 4x or 200% that's 5120x2880 and above that for a nice round scaling at 4x4 it's 7680x4320 and single digit GPU driver crash heaven! Well with some exception but it's not a light workload and with SLI and Crossfire declining in support even a 2080Ti would be struggling.)



EDIT: Should be a link in the discussion or screenshot topic for a comparison over most of the sharpen filters too and the settings used come to think of it, good way to get a quick overview even if the results will differ in motion and hardware can alter how demanding these are when toggled.
(Interesting to see old SMAA now hitting a performance impact in newer titles near 5% or so though this particular system is old and in need of a upgrade once that's possible in a year or so maybe hah.)

JBeckman wrote: I've mostly been using filmic though the anamorphic depth version could be useful if the game has a stable depth buffer, smart got quite a overhaul recently too incorporating AMD's CAS and then changing through several updates though it had a bit of a performance hit last I tested it although lately it's mostly been Division 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey which are also quite GPU demanding. (Can't use the newer compiled ReShade 3.4.x versions in Division 2 due to EAC either though it seems fairly irrelevant for D3D11 and more focused on D3D12, Win7D3D12 recently and Vulkan.)

Pending as a pull request for ReShade's shaders for now.
github.com/crosire/reshade-shaders/pulls

But can also be gotten from here along with the regular version of filmic which doesn't use the depth buffer for when that's not an option.
github.com/Fubaxiusz/fubax-shaders/tree/master/Shaders
(Network activity, issues with the game or other quirks.)

Smart's over here and is updated fairly often from the looks of things.
github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/tree/master/Shaders
( github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/commits/master )

I haven't used it as much although with some tweaking and tuning it can probably be quite good plus it has some enhancements as well for enhancing other bits.

Mostly prefer a very light sharpen effect to minimize graininess and the white or haloing or artifacts or how to describe them so that usually means dialing the strength way down slightly enhancing the image but without the associated issues and then newer fun problems like temporal stability and wonkiness.
(SMAA does quite a number on image stability if TAA's in effect as it turns out and it's not always easy to undo TAA or it has severe drawbacks because the game kinda needed that to look remotely normal or not-broken. )


Epic levels of downsampling to the degree of 200% minimum 400% recommended wouldn't hurt either but that sort of GPU just doesn't exist yet.
(At 2560x1440 and 2x2 or 4x or 200% that's 5120x2880 and above that for a nice round scaling at 4x4 it's 7680x4320 and single digit GPU driver crash heaven! Well with some exception but it's not a light workload and with SLI and Crossfire declining in support even a 2080Ti would be struggling.)



EDIT: Should be a link in the discussion or screenshot topic for a comparison over most of the sharpen filters too and the settings used come to think of it, good way to get a quick overview even if the results will differ in motion and hardware can alter how demanding these are when toggled.
(Interesting to see old SMAA now hitting a performance impact in newer titles near 5% or so though this particular system is old and in need of a upgrade once that's possible in a year or so maybe hah.)

What SMAA does is not about TAA, I believe. Yesterday I tried SMAA with Vampyr without any in-game AA, using the scale 0.050 resulted in flickering in high contrast areas. SMAA is perfect for light colors, it can literally re-build a white road sign on a light colored asphalt surface. However when it comes to fixing a very dark brown window edge bright light coming from in, in a very dark room in Vampyr, it results flickering on the corners and the edges. It moves like it is applying the jag-fix for one frame and not for the next one.

When the dedection threshold is above 0.120 flickering stops, however, SMAA loses it's worthiness considering the 2-2.5 ms drawing time.

In an ideal world, in-game TAA + SMAA + FXAA + an intelligent sharpen should be the formula for an aliasing-free experience, and should be even better than blatant high resolutions.

The expanded methods such as SMAA T2X I believe incorporated a early version of temporal anti-aliasing and then 2X and 4X worked via MSAA but it's been several years and the tech in games has moved forward a bit and newer variants of temporal anti-aliasing has come into existence though I do find SMAA and FXAA still work pretty well for what they were intended for and what ReShade allows without deeper integration into the game and rendering so it can still deliver some solid results.

Downsampling is fancy but also agreed and brute force is kinda extreme though with aliasing going past geometry and into specular highlights and shaders and other effects it's sometimes not easy to deal with though downsampling on it's own also can't fully eliminate aliasing either which is also a important point.

Still have much more to learn myself though on how all this works and goes together and then the newer games now around 2014 and on and the move towards more shader effects and additional complex layers and techniques hah well combating blurriness and aliasing both is going to be tricky though I like what ReShade allows with some tinkering and tweaking to get a got approximate and average without totally tanking framerate or the individual shader cost in terms of execution time and impact on overall GPU workload.

Although it can get a bit complex at times too with color balancing, sharpening, post-process anti-aliasing and however the game decides what works or not.
(Depth buffer access or not as a big thing for any effects requiring or improving with this being available.)

Looks like smart sharpen was just updated again too just a few hours ago.
github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/commi...0388988a604d87d47569

Will be interesting to see where this all goes and now with ray tracing I'm curious if edge detection and lines and aliasing could see further improvements something like RTAA but I suppose the compute cost is better spent on other effects until a more complete render pipeline can be maintained and slowly phase out the current raster model though that's years from now if not a decade or more.

Has little to do with ReShade for now however, merely musing on how big of a thing this could be to further improve accuracy and effect quality going beyond color or brightness and then for sharpening perhaps also utilizing depth to not hit the brighter UI elements though I suppose that's what contrast adaptive sharpening (CAS) already has a method for by how it works or my understanding of how it works at least.


Back to reading I suppose, nice to see discussion and comparisons on the subject too and what might come next plus updates to existing shaders as well improving further on what these can do.


EDIT: Hmm that's veering a bit into AA though and less on sharpening even if offsetting the TAA blur in modern games is a good use of the sharpen effect when games either lack or have a fairly basic sharpen filter of their own which might work better if disabled and used via ReShade.
(Looks like the Breakpoint beta is using AMD FX and CAS as a setting so that's interesting to see implemented in a game already and outside of driver controlled sharpening too.)

And not like that's the only source of blurriness either, plenty of good cases for using a bit or a bit more sharpening on many games both old and new.

Vampyr is indeed very ugly without its TXAA turned on. I think that his rendering system requires it to look correctly. For example there is no way to not get a lot of flickering aliasing on main character's beard and hairs even with 2xSMAA & FXAA combo if TXAA is disabled.

steamcommunity.com/app/427290/discussion...1697174779867095824/
www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/82a347/ga..._or_dirty_pixelated/

Is there a better comparison that uses a slider screen?

Hi, how do I use smart sharp, it’s not on the list of shaders on the reshade installer, what do I do to apply it to RDR2 for example, thanks in advance

How do I install smart sharp?

github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D/blob/...thers/Smart_Sharp.fx