[PERFORMANCES] Question about ReShade performance, need some explanations

Hi!

I hope crosire will see this topic and have time to respond and if not, anyone who is sure they can give me an answer is welcome but please be sure, I am trying to really understand this point.

Right now I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077. I started the game when it was in version 1.6 and at that time, ReShade had a small issue caused by REDengine that leads the game to crash when opening the map, either through the menu or directly through the shortcut.

- [TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE QUESTION WITHOUT ANY OTHER EXPLANATIONS, GO TO THE "QUESTION" MARK]

- [EXPLANATIONS]
At that time, I discovered that unchecking the options "Use aspect ratio heuristics" and "Use extended aspect ratio heuristics (for DLSS or resolution scaling)" and not checking the other two options "Copy depth buffer before clear operations" and "Copy depth buffer before fullscreen draw calls" and especially unchecking "Generic depth" under the Add-ons tab (requiring a restart of the game) allowed to play without any CTDs. By the way, others claim that checking everything solved the problem which was false, I tried to share the opposite info which worked fine but nobody seemed interested.

In short, to come back to these options under "Generic Depth" all unchecked and the option in itself unchecked too, I was able to play without any problems. Some CTDs to deplore nevertheless a few times as during the opening or closing of the Wardrobe but nothing really uncomfortable, a visual bug of the water also at a certain distance and sometimes at certain angles that gave it a viscous appearance of dirty oil. I’m not sure if it’s related to the game or to what I’m going to say next. So during this time, the game was not too bad but I noticed some performance drops, stuttering in a few places and above all I started to see a more pronounced degradation of performance when I load a save, manual or quick (I turned off automatic saves) which giving the game more stuttering than before. The only way was to leave to main menu then load the save from there.

But since yesterday, I tried to reactivate the add-on "Generic Depth" and check the options "Use aspect ratio heuristics" and "Use extended aspect ratio heuristics (for DLSS or resolution scaling)" only. And I clearly noticed better performances and more importantly, if this time someone is interested, more CTDs by opening the map.

For information, all the graphics options are at the maximum except the quality of screen space reflections in Ultra and not in Psycho and the quality of Ray-Traced lighting in Ultra and not in Psycho because if it helps to grab a few frames, it’s always that, and besides, between Ultra and Psycho, there’s no real noticeable difference. Crowd density is set to low, not because of the performance but because the NPCs are so annoying and with a disastrous pathfinding that reducing their density to the maximum is the only way to have a bearable game to avoid getting pushed away from a quest character who had the "great" idea of give us a meeting in a crowded place for a discreet operation (right, I'm talking about you Takemura...). I play at 144Hz at 1920x1080 with AMD Freesync Premium activated for the monitor, with VSync activated and using DLSS with Sharpening at maximum. GPU is an RTX3070 8Gb VRAM (I just give these infos just in case).

- [QUESTION]
Does the activation of the "Generic Depth" add-on and the "Use aspect ratio heuristics" and "Use extended aspect ratio heuristics (for DLSS or resolution scaling)" options have an impact on game performance when using ReShade? And to the contrary, can disabling them cause performance losses?

I probably could have asked the question directly, but I wanted to be as complete as possible.

Thank you for reading and for the potential answers.

 

The Generic Depth add-on does have an impact on performance, as it needs to track all draw calls of the game to figure which depth buffers exist and how they are used, which is costly.

The two aspect ratio heuristics options however have zero impact on performance. They only affect which depth buffer of the ones the add-on has deemed possible candidates will be chosen, but all the costly work to get those candidates has already happened by that point.

So it's logical to see that now, I have better performances with the same quality than before after I reactivated the Generic Depth.

Thank you! I will ensure to enable it in every game. I only have disabled it for CP2077 because REDengine issues with map but now the problem is solved, it's enable on every game. I just make sure to enable the DLSS or resolution scaling option too if I use the options ingame.

Thank you!