Favorite Reshade effecs?

I wonder what are your favorite Reshade effects to enhance graphics? Especially for older games. Personally I love to crank up the AA as high as possible to get a smoother image and even a slight blur filter on older games since it makes them look a lot softer when they have a low poly count.

Also I wonder how important it is to choose the right graphics API when installing reshade for a game? I installed reshade for Brothers in Arms Road to Hill 30 and choose Direct3D 10+, but I found out that the game is actually made for D3D 9. I did not notice anything out of order in having it running with D3D 10+ though? But not sure what actually changes.

I like a "filmic" type look with a bit of high contrast s-curves, bloom and grain.
i.lensdump.com/i/WDwI8e.png
i.lensdump.com/i/WDwZQk.png

For me a combination of SMAA, simple sharpening, MXAO (two layers with IL) and Pirate Bloom or Gaussian Bloom is usually enough. Of course I'm also using my own lut png file - Default lut with added reverse tonemapping (to flatten the image) and then Levels Plus, colorfulness, Fake HDR, clarity 2 and a few layers of small adjustments made in Photoshop (with added filmic tonemapping - from free filmic luts made for hobbistical color grading). I must say I like playing with lut.fx and MXAO the most. Nothing too ''performance hungry'' as my current PC is pretty old.

I made a similar mistake in the past (more than once for sure). Using dxd9.dll files for DirectX 11 games (or the other way around). No issues.

pneumatic wrote: I like a "filmic" type look with a bit of high contrast s-curves, bloom and grain.
i.lensdump.com/i/WDwI8e.png
i.lensdump.com/i/WDwZQk.png

Looking nice. Alan Wake is a pretty little gem.. Not "NextGen" looking for sure, but still holding up pretty well.

I personally go with a pretty small stack of effects. Deband/TriDither is a must especially for older titles, FilmicAnamorphSharpen, and a simple "cinematic" stack consisting of LUT.fx using a LUT generated in Photoshop, qUINT Bloom and some film grain. If the game supports depth, definitely qUINT MXAO and Cinematic DoF. Plus SMAA since in-game AA is no longer an option, and stronger sharpening to bring back more detail lost from SMAA.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember reading somewhere along the lines of how ReShade is actually generic in nature and the options merely rename the .dll to what the game application is most likely to recognise. It's a forum post somewhere here.

Deband, sharpening and SMAA here too.
Tri Dither sounds interesting but I need to understand it a bit better, sounded like something geared towards HDR from my early readup on the shader but ReShade doesn't (yet) do HDR from what I know or support the hardware mode of it instead of the earlier adaptive shader effect called HDR.

Varying between the regular anamorphic sharpening and the depth sharpening effect plus SMAA might also work better at depth to avoid temporal crawling if the game has something like this going on which isn't always easy to disable or perhaps jittering would be easier to describe what it looks like visually.

Outline shader and mesh edges as a fun effect but good results require some pretty specific settings and ideally a higher display resolution and downsampling plus the game itself can fit more or less well to the effect.

LevelsPlus for balancing R,G,B and a few other parameters, more for later hardware and maybe properly calibrating the display for once though but interesting to mess around with and seeing what can be done even if it requires a lot of work to use it to it's full effect and correct problematic color balancing properly.

Mainly ReShade to me was just a SMAA injector with some extra features as it kept being updated but eventually more shaders made for some good additions so instead of a simple but generally OK for how little it costs anti-aliasing mode there's now a way to combat banding and blur at least partially though I need to learn much more on how the effects and ReShade itself works as I am mostly just going by visual results and what it looks like rather than actually understanding what it's doing and side effects, issues and consequences from performance problems which yeah they can exist to compatibility such as the depth buffer issues that have been a thing recently for many effects relying on this being available and working as intended.

Depends all on the game.
-smaa hq if the game doesn't provide a good aa option.
Especially on older dx9 games like dead space, a combination of surface reflection, mxao and HDR and a bit of bloom on top looks great, almost like a dx11 game.