Best shaders to use for beginners with Reshade?

Hey all,

I'm new to all of this but at the same time not looking to master it. I just want to make The Elder Scrolls and possibly WildStar (if anyone can ever figure out how to use it again for WildStar since an update) the best graphically they can be. Really love for the games I play to shine.

My question is if there is a preferred method to use with ReShade (or even no ReShade at all if that's the case) for a beginner like myself to use that would be easiest for me to find a tutorial or learn myself. Tried using FrameWork on ESO and just seemed like too many in-depth options for me to use. Not trying to spend days on learning everything. Just enough to make some good differences in these games. Help is appreciated. Thanks.

Hiro1221 wrote: Hey all,

I'm new to all of this but at the same time not looking to master it. I just want to make The Elder Scrolls and possibly WildStar (if anyone can ever figure out how to use it again for WildStar since an update) the best graphically they can be. Really love for the games I play to shine.

My question is if there is a preferred method to use with ReShade (or even no ReShade at all if that's the case) for a beginner like myself to use that would be easiest for me to find a tutorial or learn myself. Tried using FrameWork on ESO and just seemed like too many in-depth options for me to use. Not trying to spend days on learning everything. Just enough to make some good differences in these games. Help is appreciated. Thanks.

most of the shaders do the same thing in one way or another "color correction" or take away colors in a sense,i personally only use tonemapping(i perfer reinhard) and smaa.In the current state even with a setting called UI masking it can be very annoying to get shaders that use pixel brightness to work to not pick up user interfaces so personally till that is fixed i just stick to tonemapping and smaa my two main go to shaders to fix things in games smaa im sure will help tons in eso as in game antialiasing is crap and you should turn it off and use smaa instead tonemapping is useful for either giving darker colors more contrast to lighter ones or vise versa one thing i like to combine with this is a LUT or color look up table to make this use some image editor like photoshop gimp works to and a in game screenshot then using the lut texture you can now make a color look up table the game will follow with any bightness/contrast color tints that you do to the image through this LUT good way to take the super saturated look out of some games without making it look bleached"washed out"

In terms of straight up inprovement, mess around with SMAA in SweetFX, and AO and DOF in McFX (for those games that have depth buffer access anyway - check the Compatibility List to see if your game has that).

After that, in terms of more subjective improvements, the next areas to go would be color and lighting. For colors, play with TONEMAP, VIBRANCE, CURVES, FILMIC PASS and HDR in SweetFX, and for lighting try LEVELS in SweetFX, and BLOOM and AMBIENT LIGHT in GemFX. LIFTGAMMAGAIN is used for both colors and lighting, where you want to mess with one entire row of the matrix at a time to change the brightness for shadows, midtones, or highlights altogether, and then you can make subtle changes to specific values to change the tint of whatever corresponds to that particular row of the matrix.

Then you can add effects like DITHER, FILM GRAIN and DEBAND to reduce color banding if there is any.

It's really all a feel and style thing though, and everyone has their own approach to it, so just try everything until you find a look you like.

Appreciate the info. Guess biggest thing I'm confused about right now is where are all of these settings to start? Are you referring to the Settings file you can open with notepad to put a 1 or 0 in order to activate them? If so, that means I'm just turning things on and off to see how they work until I find a good place for me?

As for SMAA, not too familiar with how that works either but I went ahead and followed this person's setup here: imgur.com/a/kJo3t using Nvidia Inspector. Do you know if this person's setup is good to use or if Nvidia Inspector is even better to use than SFX's settings?

Thank you very much. Just a word of wise please use more periods when writing messages. If not it all blends together and can make what you write a headache to read as well as less sensible. You seem very knowledgeable in what you shared but it's coming off less easy on the eyes to follow.

I'm hearing a lot about SMAA. Is this setting and the others you mentioned simply in the settings file located in SFX folder where you press 1 or 0 to activate or is there another place for settings? If that is it, should I be seeing sliders or something?

Hiro1221 wrote: Appreciate the info. Guess biggest thing I'm confused about right now is where are all of these settings to start?

When you download Framework, the files you want are the .cfg files in the Reshade folder.

I thought you were speaking of SweetFX. Framework seems a bit much for a newby like myself. So many different options and such plus it for some reason corrupted my files in ESO and I had to re-download the game so not sure if I want to attempt again. Removing the files wasn't enough to fix it either.

Do your tips still apply for SFX+ReShade? If so, where should I be finding it's settings. Thanks.

If you're having trouble using Framework, you can still install ReShade the old fashioned way. Just download the Framework package, and copy three things into the .exe directory for your game:
- ReShade.fx
- the "ReShade" folder
- Either ReShade32.dll or ReShade64.dll, depending on whether the game is 32-bit or 64-bit, respectively

Then rename ReShade32.dll (or ReShade64.dll, depending on which one you copied) to either "d3d9.dll", "dxgi.dll", or "opengl32.dll", depending on whether the game uses DX9, DX11, or OpenGL. Check the Compatibility List if you're unsure of which one your game uses.

That's all you have to do to install. Just open up the .cfg files in the ReShade folder in your favorite text editor and start messing with stuff.

Hiro1221 wrote: Appreciate the info. Guess biggest thing I'm confused about right now is where are all of these settings to start? Are you referring to the Settings file you can open with notepad to put a 1 or 0 in order to activate them? If so, that means I'm just turning things on and off to see how they work until I find a good place for me?

As for SMAA, not too familiar with how that works either but I went ahead and followed this person's setup here: imgur.com/a/kJo3t using Nvidia Inspector. Do you know if this person's setup is good to use or if Nvidia Inspector is even better to use than SFX's settings?

just stating this unless elderscrolls online has native support for hbao+ the ambient occlusion in the driver isnt being applied there and the doesnt support any form of msaa or supersampling on its game engine how its setup the game is dx11 and only dx9 sgssaa could be forced if lucky and only if they sorted out the fullscreen issue its been like this since beta.Think of smaa as msaa but post , it has great edge detection and no weird abnormalities that usually show up in games and cost a little more then fxaa(depends on what version your using, think reshade is based off version 3 using a mix between quality and less blur not best at edge detection) smaa blurs less and in some cases you wont even notice it.Back on topic smaa is vastly better then the "fxaa" being used on eso which is really crappy normally in a lot of cases fxaa can detect more lines but at the cost of blurring and detail being lost. Where smaa and fxaa can really be seen at work is aliasing inside textures where you might have writing on a wall this will fix aliasing if it exists.Long story short its prefrence on what you use smaa fxaa or none at all but smaa overall and in general will improve eso graphically like many have posted use this or that my view is to enhance existing shaders not try to fix something in a generic way which is why ill never use a shader like ambient light without being able to use it in more detail having actual game render data requiring you to debug the game and map out the render paths of what you want to "fix" or "improve" on reshade is generic and the shaders should be thought of in that way my opinion ambient light will give you a good hit on fps btw

The beauty of writing shader for me is doing specifically stuff that was considered not being possible in a generic way by the majority of people.

Therefore, I differentiate generic shader.
The usual generic shader takes not much input into account and does exactly what the majority expects from generic shader. (That doest NOT mean its simpler code)
However, if you want to do more you have to write a -what I like to call- "smart" shader. This kind of shader considers a significant amount of dynamically generated input to estimate non-generic behavior/results. You will most likely not get 100% non-generic results and the more accurate you want to be the higher the cost but in most cases something like 80% accuracy is sufficient for non-generic illusion.

Take the heathaze shader in combination with the ambient light shader as an example (motion focus would have been another great example). In about 80% of all possible scenes I can show you amazingly results that come very close to the results you would expect from a non-generic heathaze shader. Your rarely (maybe never) will get a scene where it looks weird. The shader has a decent amount of fps hit for how smart it is and for creating a non-generic solution that still the majority people dont believe is possible to achieve in a generic way

Thanks for the post. Making my own shaders seems too in-depth for what I'm looking for. I'm just looking to make these two games, ESO and WildStar (if possible), look as good as they can with what these tools do. Frameworks seems a bit too much for me honestly with all of the options (plus it corrupted my ESO files some how when I installed it with ReShade. No idea what happened but even removing the files didn't fix it so I had to do a Repair) and I've already spent a ton of time as it is.

Thanks for making these Shader programs for us btw. Much appreciated. If you could recommend what shaders to use/not sure in general or even better if specific to ESO and/or WildStar.

LuciferHawk wrote: The beauty of writing shader for me is doing specifically stuff that was considered not being possible in a generic way by the majority of people.

Therefore, I differentiate generic shader.
The usual generic shader takes not much input into account and does exactly what the majority expects from generic shader. (That doest NOT mean its simpler code)
However, if you want to do more you have to write a -what I like to call- "smart" shader. This kind of shader considers a significant amount of dynamically generated input to estimate non-generic behavior/results. You will most likely not get 100% non-generic results and the more accurate you want to be the higher the cost but in most cases something like 80% accuracy is sufficient for non-generic illusion.

Take the heathaze shader in combination with the ambient light shader as an example (motion focus would have been another great example). In about 80% of all possible scenes I can show you amazingly results that come very close to the results you would expect from a non-generic heathaze shader. Your rarely (maybe never) will get a scene where it looks weird. The shader has a decent amount of fps hit for how smart it is and for creating a non-generic solution that still the majority people dont believe is possible to achieve in a generic way

btw wasn't trying to sound like ambient light shader isn't useful it just generally results negatively for me in games i play that would require more fiddeling to make it work correctly.Example over bright areas detail loss in areas near bright areas contrast killed in some spots just based on the light source from the sun in oribit around earth in a game i play goes against my entire thinking when it comes to applying a shader to something to not take more away then your giving back making it look worse, now i do understand this is in my cases and may or may not work good in every game just how things are.The biggest annoyance with the shader in general is detection of what its being applied on UI gets hit often some spots just end up looking out of place and wrong brightness wise, idk how this would compare to global illumination or truely how ambient light is used in games but my experience with it is subpar and not worth the performance hit hell as many times as ive read on the forums framework/reshade with nothing applied should cost 0fps yet in some games i see frame loss with nothing running or something that should cost 1-3fps costing close to 12 in some cases im not near good enough to program a debugger and give you more detailed info but with recent releases seems to have something off this issue floats around for me every once in a while.Little off topic there but back on, my personal goal and idea of how to aprouch using any type of shader hooking or creation is to show as much detail originally put there without losing colors or brightness in the scene in a negative way which is why i dont use 90% of the framework its all repeat effects that one or two could fix for me lol and yea if ambient light didnt take upwards of 20-30fps on star wars the old republic id be using it i lose 30fps on that game with no effects running again "debugging info would be super helpful but oh well not my problem"

Bit lost here. Where's this ambient light shader? I finally got some stuff going but would like the lights in the game (lamp posts, fires, etc.) to be brighter/more realistic.

Hiro1221 wrote: Bit lost here. Where's this ambient light shader? I finally got some stuff going but would like the lights in the game (lamp posts, fires, etc.) to be brighter/more realistic.

If you are using the framework, it is a shader in the GemFx suite.

Have also a look at the bloom shader cause thats maybe what you are looking for.

It might also be what Kleio420 was looking for when applying AL?

@Kleio420, I suspect you either want AL to be something totally different or expect it to do something totally different from what it actually is and from what it actually does. AL works as intended but like a monochrome shader, if you don't want a black and white result, why apply it?

To also answer your question in the other thread

What AL can do (some is optional):
Combine major existing scene lightning to boost ambience of a scene while having various tendencies (warm, cold, or natural).
Support of various (most optional) lens effects.
The following are "smart" features coming with AL (therefore more expensive but heavily optimized; also optional)
Adjust AL according to scene light.
Adjust/control Heathaze according to scene light.
Adjust Bloom based shader according to scene light.
Allow "ENB" based palette shader to work properly.
Allow (eye) adaptation which is combined with the AL according to scene light.

This might indeed be something you did not expect but thats what AL is intended to do (currently).
I do not use the monochrome shader but thats not because it has a negative effect. It is doing what its meant to do, whether I want it or not I have to discuss with myself only.