ReShade - Advanced post-processing everywhere (SweetFX)

Well, THANKS TO USELESS README FILE MENTIONING IT.
Whoever wrote it should receive the same quality manual for his chainsaw.


Okay, now it just ignores all the settings in SweetFX_settings.txt. It just loads ALL shaders with default some values. If I remove the unneeded shaders, it starts to throw messages regarding sweet.fx definition

Good lord why is this injector such a trainwreck?

 

Just copy it into your game and be done with it. If you don't want certain shaders then you may disable them (don't simply remove stuff, there are dependencies and references, you can't just delete random stuff and expect everything to work) in the "SweetFX/SweetFX_settings.txt" config file. And the readme is for ReShade itself, not ReShade + SweetFX. =)

 

Has anyone managed to get Reshade to work with ENB on Skyrim.
When I try to use it via proxy with ENB (wrapper) the game crashes righ away.
If I try using ENB via injector, and Reshade as d3d9.dll, the game works but there's a lot of graphics glitches.

Using ENB with SweetFX 1.5.1 works perfectly, but since I'm using Windows 8.1 SMAA doesn't work.

 

*Sigh*

Somebody has to finally say it, so I guess it will have to be me.

It has given me great pains over the last few months to watch what I can only describe as the abject decline of SweetFX. The apparent abandonment of its original sleek & fast nature is a grave mistake in my opinion. To further compound the problem by throwing SweetFX into a barrel with several other much less popular clones (no offense to the respective authors) is practically suicidal.

Sorry CeeJay, but you need to take the oars back from outsiders and stop SweetFX from drowning in a sea of sameness and useless bloat. Of course I realize that such a decision is yours alone.

P.S. This post is entirely rhetorical, so please don't feel the need to respond in any way.

As always, thanks for creating SweetFX and saving PC gamers from the blurry mess that is the world of console ports.

 

Thank you for posting this! Totally agreed with you. For a long time i just using the 1.4+ Boulotaur2024 and 1.5.1 versions because they are fast and greatly doing their job. But later releases are slow in terms of performance at 2560x1440 and higher resolutions. IMHO: even if they are bring something new and the fact this versions are "alpha" and "preview" the quality/performance ratio is not good. My post is also rhetorical and i always appreciate the great job on SweetFX done by the author.

 

A couple of things for you both --

It's worth noting Reshade and SweetFX 2.0 is not progress for progress sake -- like CJ and Crosire and doing this because they have nothing better to do -- it's progress because it's absolutely essential for SweetFX to continue.

The original MrHaandi injector was and always been a proof of concept. It was far from perfect, and development stopped not long after it was released long ago. This is why Boulotour attempted to re-invent it, as well Crosire's first attempt with eFX. Both were looking to fill the MrHaandi injector's short-comings.

Boulotour eventually abandoned his injector (this is not an easy piece of software to code) but has helped Crosire out with Reshade, combining their experience.

And Crosire, of course, realising the magnitude of what was required to do an injector well, scrapped eFX and started building Reshade from the ground up to create what is shaping up to be a truly remarkable piece of software.

What are the short-comings of the original MrHaandi? These include being DX9 only, 32-bit only, and being convoluted to make new shaders for. The MrHaandi injector doesn't work with DX8, DX10, DX11, OpenGL, 64-bit games, and most importantly of all: Windows 8.1 and above. Boulotour added 64-bit and DX11 support, but didn't address the rest.

That last point on Windows is critical: with Windows 10 coming and fixing all that's wrong with Windows 8, as well as adding DX12 -- and being a free upgrade -- everyone will be gaming on Windows 10 by the end of the year. And the only injector that fully works with Windows 10 will be Reshade. The others will be non-functioning (thanks to a change in DXGI since Windows 8.1 that breaks MrHaandi and Boulotaur). Without Reshade, SweetFX injecting would be dead in the water.

On top of this, Crosire has made it easy for shader authors to build their own shader packs to plug into Reshade just like SweetFX does (Reshade even includes its own compiler!), giving us -- gamers and consumers -- even more options to improve our games. And all for free. Just think on that for a moment.

This says nothing of the new features Reshade brings to the table. By exposing the depth buffer, Ceejay and others can improve the quality of the SMAA shader, add depth of field and much more. This is a higher quality package than any previous injector and shader set (you can use CJ's depth-improved SMAA now in SweetFX 2.0).

And yes, it's in development and yes Crosire has said there are performance optimisations to come, but Rome wasn't built in a day and -- perhaps it's just my system -- but I don't see Reshade performing any worse than MrHaandi or Boulotour. Keep in mind the biggest performance drop doesn't come from the injector, it comes from the shaders you run. This is what users of Reshade and MasterEffect are currently reporting, but if you read the Reshade forums you'll see Marty is working on optimising MasterEffect.

I hope that explains some things!

Finally don't forget Reshade has its own forums at: http://reshade.me/forum/index. And, you can donate to the project (I believe donations get split between Crosire and CJ at the moment, maybe they can clarify) by clicking on the 'Donate' button at the bottom of the homepage at: http://reshade.me. And honestly, every gamer who's ever enjoyed using SweetFX with their games should throw in a little coin

 

I'm on Windows 8.1 as well and SMAA works fine running SweetFX 1.5.1 through ENB.

 

Martigen Thanks for your "explanation", but in fact there is no need to explain something in that case. There are NO insults here for CJ or Crosire or Boulotaur for their great work on SFx and ReShade.
For the "ReShade part" of your post and your obvious addiction for this software. Let me use the proverb - maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see...
About depth buffer - there is partial access and no access in bunch of games including many "AAA" games and popular titles. So this is not the fair point from you.
The story with ENB can repeat and we can see the same problems with low performance even on the powerfull systems with most interesting and meaningful effects. I hope that problems will be resolved in near future. Even more i can say i believe in this great guys!

 

The idea is good, but I think i can only use one proxy with ENB.
The means that I can either use SMAA or SweetFX.
The problem is that without SweetFX I can use Lumasharpen and a few other settings.

I'll try to find out if ENB has some form of Lumasharpen in it.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I already managed to enable SMAA on Skyrim.

 

On performance :

SweetFX 2.0 is still in beta in large part due to this problem.

As a injector reshade is actually faster than InjectSMAA, but for SweetFX 2.0 I choose not to bunch effect together in the same pass because this negatively affects the quality of some of the effects.

F.x Lumasharpen in the same pass as SMAA was a hack to allow it to even work and resulted in edges being less smooth.
I did what I could to lessen this issue and for the most part it worked well - it's hard to spot in SweetFX 1.5.1.

But for SweetFX 2.0 I have chosen to do things right and run effects in separate passes when it is necessary to maintain the best quality - and more passes costs performance.

Doing things right = better quality = less performance. Sorry.

That said the first beta separated more effects in different passes than absolutely necessary and later betas combine some of the passes to reduce this overhead. So performance in the later betas have improved.

Also I updated SMAA to version 2.8 from my optimized 2.6 that was in SweetFX 1.x and this also cost performance - in fact I suspect this is the main cause of the performance decrease you are seeing.

I slowly optimized 2.6 over the course of 2 years and I have not done the same to 2.8. I've tried to go 2.8 over and see what I can do and I've improved it some, but it's still not at the same performance level as the earlier version.

So I'm contemplating going back to 2.6 until I can make 2.8 just as fast. This will also allow me to compare performance to SweetFX 1.5.1 in an apples to apples comparison, and determine if it might be something in ReShade thats holding it back.

About the framework:
The common framework that includes SweetFX and other shader suites is not going to replace SweetFX.

It's meant as another option for those that want to mix effects from different suites.
I still intend to keep SweetFX as a standalone suite that focuses on ease of use and performance, and I don't intend to include every effect under the sun.

During the 2.0 beta period and for future beta you will probably see some new effects being added and some removed as I trial them and get feedback from the community on them.

Effects I might replace :
Bloom (the current bloom is slow, hard to tweak and the quality is not great) - to be replaced with a better one.
Advanced CRT and Pixelart CRT - They look good and have tons of options but are slow and hard to tweak. I'd like to find better CRT effect or make my own.
Technicolor2 - I don't see the improvement over Technicolor .. this may go again.
Cel - pretty basic .. I think we can do better

Stuff that needs fixing :
Splitscreen have not yet been updated to work correct with the new passes and so only works for some effects.
FilmGrain - the movement of the grain needs work and certain ultra high resolutions create interference patterns which means I will have to tweak the random number generation which is tricky work and a bit of luck. I've currently taken this apart for beta 9 and have not put it back again.

Also intended for 2.0 are a few killer effects that I really want and I want to include them before I can release 2.0 final.

Oh and as you've found out I need to write another manual.

Some people ask why there have been no SweetFX releases for a year, but they don't realize just how much work was done for the EFX development and redone again for Reshade - and not just on the SweetFX shaders because I also do QA on Reshade.

 

To be fair, this is fully on me and not CeeJay's fault. I didn't upload the latest ReShade together with standalone SweetFX at first, since I thought it would be nice to show the work of those other authors too. I wasn't expecting such a negative view on that. Since corrected my mistake, so SweetFX 2.0 is downloadable without the additional framework around again.

Why not? Yes, there are still a lot of issues (the whole thing is complex, so I'm not surprised), but for the time being it gives access to quite a good palette of games from old to newest AAA titles and that's better than nothing, right?

I'm sad to hear you're not happy with the current developments, so if you want to throw in any suggestions on what bothers you most, then please go ahead. A solution can only be found if one is fully aware of the problem. And while we are there ....

Guess the ReShade + SweetFX package should better contain a readme on how to install that ReShade + SweetFX package and not the core ReShade injector. That readme was a straight copy of the one for shader developers, so yeah, it really isn't doing a great job in that location. Then again, unfortunately nobody seems to read readmes these days anymore (so thumbs up for being part of the few that still do!).

 

Has performance really been this *bad* with the latest releases? I never really did any benchmarks to compare the different injectors.

I love how the current versions are to set up, work, and bring all the effects for all the latest games. Lacking some "real" comparative benchmarks, I couldn't even say that older versions were much faster.

 

I think it is a good idea to show off the work of other authors, I've always wondered about Mastereffects and GemFX, and the framework makes this easier to try. I don't think any negative view came from this, but just from people expecting to drop it in plug-and-play style over 0.16 and having all the key toggles work the same way

It's actually pretty damn cool that you can order effects among all the shader packs in 0.17. Being able to mix and match effects from all them is incredibly powerful. Just one question: on the performance side, do any disabled effects still contribute to processing in the injector? i.e is it still parsing say Mastereffects along with SweetFX even if no Mastereffects shaders have been enabled? If so, is it worth adding global toggles for each shader pack in Common_settings.txt?

 

If you will permit me the liberty to do some surgery on your original post to make excerpts I think it will help me to illustrate some points better.

Progress is defined as improvement. From my standpoint, Reshade has simply not presented any improvements to SweetFX users. Like its abandoned predecessor EFX, it mostly just introduces insurmountable incompatibility problems with no other benefits. Unlike its predecessor, Reshade actually degrades performance as well.

Please don't spread fud. The original injectSMAA injector by mrhaandi does work on DX9, DX10, DX11 32bit applications and states that fact very plainly on his website. From a practical standpoint, the list of Triple-AAA game titles that would require the use of an OpenGL or DX8 injector is slim to none. Since the vast majority of games are 32bit (or at least include a 32bit exe) then 64bit compatibility isn't actually necessary either. 64bit compatibility is obviously an improvement but the lack of it isn't a deal breaker.

Just like vista did with xp, the primary purpose of win8 was to trick people who were perfectly satisfied with win7 to "upgrade".
M$ has been playing this shell game for its entire history as outlined in these simple steps:
1. Release good OS that everybody likes for $200.00.
2. Encourage (force) upgrade to new OS that everybody hates for $200.00.
3. Release good OS to "fix" previous bad OS for $200.00.
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 forever.

This is the extremely effective "business plan" that M$ has used for more than a decade to become very wealthy.
The other main purpose of win8 was to try to force people into a M$ controlled app-store and the introduction of UEFI "secure boot". The only thing that currently prevents a total lockout of any competing OS (like SteamOS, Linux, etc.) is the inclusion of a software disable switch for secure boot. Guess what win10 removes?

So, let's update the steps to fit with the new practices:
1. Encourage (force) upgrade to new OS that everybody hates and that locks out the competition for $200.00.
2. Release good OS to "fix" previous bad OS while retaining the competitor lock out for $200.00.
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 forever.

Before you blindly "upgrade" to the shiny new win10 make sure you understand that you might be locked out of SteamOS and all other Linux based OS.

If I want another shader suite I will go looking for it on my own. I don't appreciate the previously sleek SweetFX being thrown into a melange of bloated & inefficient clones. Let others prove their merits on their own instead of piggy-backing on SweetFX and I might consider looking into using them.

Firstly, the performance of the new version of SMAA is worse not better.
Secondly, the new generic depth buffer might be an interesting toy but it has no serious use to me. I despise DOF effects and HBAO doesn't interest me. The whole reason I use SweetFX in the first place is to make the game clearer, not more blurry.

I know it very well and have been telling people exactly that. The question is why do the Reshade crew & supporters keep coming here on the wrong forum again and again to promote Reshade?

 

Dude, what
SMAA is bundled with last 1.5.1 version.

---

@about performance:

I'm ok with it, really.
Performance with last ReShade + SweetFX preview is great.
I'm also voting for quality over performance.

It is a beta afterall, people can always use 1.5.1 instead.

Yeah, a bloom more like MasterEffect's one would really neat (I'm using master effect pretty much because of it).

 

Hey, when using only SMAA in ReShade 0.17.0 Public Beta with SweetFX 2.0 Beta 8 washes out colors/makes them brighter by a noticeable amount. I'm guessing this is a bug?
Edit: I forgot to mention this for opengl.

 

Could whoever is in charge of the of the Guru3D/SweetFX forum please fix the link here:
http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/sweetfx-shader-suite-download.html

It points to the old closed thread instead of the currently active SweetFX thread.

It's kind of a pain to have to go through a bunch of extra steps just to get on the proper page.

Thanks,

 

SMAA doesn't work on Windows 8.1
The only way to make it work is using the newer version of REshade or with Radeon Pro. With SweetFX it doesn't work on this OS.

 

Well, in fact this is a deal-breaker. All the latest games I bought were 64-bit. And then the "forced" update from 8.0 to 8.1. Look at the Steam stats, how many people there are using Win 8.1. No compatibility to this is another deal-breaker for sure.

 

Sorry, but I fail to understand your point since SweetFX(Boulotaur) & RadeonPro already provide 64bit compatibility.

FYI: I wouldn't touch the atrocity known as win8 or its siblings with a ten foot pole myself.
I am using win7_x64_SP1 and I have absolutely zero problems using SweetFX on all my games.

If win8, win8.1, win8.2 (codename=win10) is such a headache then why don't you downgrade to the relatively trouble free world of win7?