GettingDepth Buffer, as well as game compatibility

I'm a software developer. I want to look at the depth buffer of various games. It seems that ReShade doesn't provide that capability ... for cheating reasons?

Does ReShade include a simple Depth Buffer to Greyscale shader by default? (that is, from the github?) Am I just missing it?

Also, unfortunately, many of the games that I play... don't appear to work.

- (IIRC, ~last year, older version) System Shock 2 only showed the depth for the FPS gun. Is there a way to modify or tweak ReShade to adjust how it's capturing data to possibly fix this?

- Deus Ex using both DX9 and DX10 renderers don't work in the same way. Only color modifying shaders work and it only affects the 2-D HUD.

- Postal 2 doesn't appear to work. (I guess Unreal 2 engine games aren't supported?) It seems like there's no depth information, or something else is missing. Again, only the color modfiying shaders seem to work. For example, DOF never changes and shows permanent blur at the bottom and none at the very top.

- In both games, the statistics show zero draw calls. That seems like a big red flag that isn't not hooking correctly.

- STALKER: Clear Sky supposedly has proper support per the games page. But I get a solid black screen on loading a level. (Menu system works.)

In games that "don't work" is there anything that can be tweaked? Are there any plans for ReShade to be adapted to support them?

Thank you in advance.

[edit] Now I just tried Quake 3 and I get constant flickering and it appears that once ReShade loads, the video drawing stops updating--but still flickers wildly. The same happens with IOQuake3. If I blindly go through the menus to get into a match, the text is all missing but 3-D works. The mouse... doesn't appear to work. But "maybe" that was a button I pushed blindly.

From my understanding of it to avoid ReShade possibly getting blacklisted the depth buffer is disabled when network activity is registered or well I'm not 100% sure on the technical implementation on how this is monitored but Crosire has explained his reasons for this a couple of times so any MMO or multi-player oriented game will either have limited or no depth buffer access.

And yeah there was a shader for viewing the depth buffer back with 2.x though I do not know if something similar is part of the 3.x Github shaders, I use the debug view of the SMAA shader to check depth buffer status but there might be a simpler way that I've just missed.


Some newer games also use logarithmic behavior or how it's called which can be set in the 3.x GUI along with inverting the depth buffer (Usually also always used with logarithmic from my understanding.) and flipping it (Usually used with Unity Engine games?) so it can take some tinkering and yeah if there's sporadic network traffic the depth buffer turns itself on and off and so on, for MMO's it's usually active when you're not in the vicinity of other players to use a example.
(I guess effects like SSAO or depth of field which require depth would almost look like they're flickering if it constantly switches between disabled and enabled depth access.)

- How do I find out whether or not ReShade is intentionally breaking depth buffer access? I have no intentions of using this for cheating. I'm trying to research some potential depth buffer-related shaders using real-time data from existing games .

- Where do I find a depth buffer shader? I keep Googling but I'm not turning up anything...

- Anyone have any more tips for troubleshooting why games don't work? Any "tweaks"? Like I said, Quake 3 was supposed to work with ioquake but I get no 2-D and it's still hard to tell whether depth is working without a real depth buffer.

For testing depth-buffer shaders, try loading them on a 3d game that's exclusively single-player, like Skyrim.
Minecraft, for example, runs on an internal server to emulate single player, which *might* break depth buffer access. I know I don't have any for it.

As for a shader to view the depth buffer, there used to be one but it hasn't been ported to 3.0 yet. Use a debug view for SMAA/MXAO/something depth based to confirm it's working.

PirateKitty's SSAO shader has depth output as a debug tool implemented.

Depth output effect: reshade.me/forum/troubleshooting/2259-so...-0-but-not-3-0#17558