Reshade Is Finally Viable for Better Graphics/Better Performance

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Download Link: https://filebin.net/62a1qsachwybqorw

You'll need to install reshade via selecting the dark mod folder, OpenGL. 
After Reshade is installed to the game folder, copy the contents of the Tdmreshade.7z to the game folder.
Once installed it should popup allowing you to press the "Home" keyboard key to see enabled shaders.
Everything should be enabled by default. ATA, SMAA, and Zenteon Framework are all part of the new AA system.
Disabling Zenteon Framework and ATA will significantly improve performance, SMAA can be left on with minimal performance impact.
Lightroom contains all changes to colors/whitebalance, disabling will restore TDM colors but won't impact performance much.
MXAO/Ambient Occlusion is the biggest impact visually and and is set to the highest performance mode, FGFX provides some ambient light scattering/fake volumetric fx, can be disabled for minimal performance gain. Ambient Light can be a bit of a performance hog, so if you need to disable something for more fps I'd start there.
If motion is too blurry try setting motion quality to high in the Zenteon Framework shader, or disable ATA and Zenteon Framework entirely if you don't like TAA.
It should be a bit cleaner in motion than typical TAA implementation like Unreal.
If you like some aspects of the changed coloring but not all, dig through lightroom, many things can be adjusted to taste.
If it looks under-saturated you can increase saturation, think of saturation as "color compression" whereas vibrance increases the dynamic range of colors.
Adjusting white balance is an easy way to make lighting appear warmer or cooler.

Upon revisiting TDM after a 5-10 year hiatus, I've found reshade is actually quite usable now, and can add high quality Temporal AA, Ambient Occlusion (much better than TDM's default/noisy AO, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (for those who find the in game sharpening is too strong/noisy), and a faked volumetric lighting type effect that runs much better on low end hardware.
Not only do these fx often look better than TDM's built in options, in many cases they run better too. 
I'll post a config when I get around to it, but here's an idea of what it can look like, I also use a color correction shader as well:

Before: 
After: 

Edited August 13, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Couple more shots. 
The color correction is subtle enough, brings lighting tone more in line with Thief 2, removes piss filter, tones down saturation a bit while boosting the dynamic range of colors, so rather than every color being turned to 11 all the time, there is a lot more subtlety/variation in colors without looking desaturated.

Before:

After:

 

Edited August 12, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Seems there was an issue with in game AA not working, but it appears to be fixed now.
So you can freely stack in game MSAA with the reshade temporal aa. I'd also recommend enabling driver level MFAA if you have an Nvidia card, as it makes in game msaa more effective. 

Edited August 12, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Now I just need to figure out how/where to actually upload a reshade...
Suggestions?

[lowenz]

MSAA and depth buffer access/reconstruction of ReShade are NOT compatible

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

1 hour ago, lowenz said:

MSAA and depth buffer access/reconstruction of ReShade are NOT compatible

Yeah well, everything appears to be working fine now, not sure how they got around it but I have a depth buffer and MSAA appears to be applied, and I'm using mxao here which requires the depth buffer.
I had heard mention of what you're talking about but it seems they fixed it at some point.
It was actually the setting in the TAA shader that were causing a bunch of extra aliasing, had to tone a few things down.

Still need to upload this somewhere though/figure out what files need to be uploaded.
Tweaked the colors a bit more, really liking the result but of course it'll be optional.

See here's the depth buffer before and after:

Edited August 12, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Forgot I had disabled bloom. I'm thinking the in game bloom doesn't affect performance too much, and looks alright, but I could replace that too. And all of this runs better than stock fx, well accept for the Temporal AA, as it's not really a replacement for MSAA but is nice to have. It uses SMAA as a base before applying motion vector based TAA, so that should allow most people to cut the MSAA down a notch.
It's just to bad MSAA-6x was never a thing, that would be perfect at 1080p.
This is all running on a 1660 super btw.

Edited August 12, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[freyk]

11 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Now I just need to figure out how/where to actually upload a reshade...
Suggestions?

How about Github? 

Nice work.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Alright, here it is: https://filebin.net/62a1qsachwybqorw
 

You'll need to install reshade selecting the dark mod folder, choose OpenGL. 
After Reshade is installed to the game folder, copy the contents of the Tdmreshade.7z to the game folder.
Once installed it should popup allowing you to press the "Home" keyboard key to see enabled shaders.
Everything should be enabled by default. ATA, SMAA, and Zenteon Framework are all part of the new AA system.
Disabling Zenteon Framework and ATA will significantly improve performance, SMAA can be left on with minimal performance impact.
Lightroom contains all changes to colors/whitebalance, disabling will restore TDM colors but won't impact performance much.
MXAO/Ambient Occlusion is the biggest impact visually and and is set to the highest performance mode, FGFX provides some ambient light scattering/fake volumetric fx, can be disabled for minimal performance gain. Ambient Light can be a bit of a performance hog, so if you need to disable something for more fps I'd start there.
If motion is too blurry try setting motion quality to high in the Zenteon Framework shader, or disable ATA and Zenteon Framework entirely if you don't like TAA.
It should be a bit cleaner in motion than typical TAA implementation like Unreal.
If you like some aspects of the changed coloring but not all, dig through lightroom, many things can be adjusted to taste.
If it looks under-saturated you can increase saturation, think of saturation as "color compression" whereas vibrance increases the dynamic range of colors.
Adjusting white balance is an easy way to make lighting appear warmer or cooler.

Edited August 13, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[snatcher]

On 8/12/2025 at 7:27 PM, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Now I just need to figure out how/where to actually upload a reshade...
Suggestions?

Have a look to ModDB, see if your project fits:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Yeah im posting here as a beta test, had to adjust things already, as i'm still learning what all the shader settings do.
Fixed ao, had it set to quarter rate shading to try improving performance, but clearly rendering ao at 15 fps was causing issues in motion. There are still a couple things I can't fix. The depth buffer doesn't account for readables, so the scene ao gets rendered on top of the readable. Text is still readable but it's a bit immersion breaking. Only fix I can think of would be integrating readables into the depth buffer TDM side. There is also some strangeness in the depth buffer for fires and torches, where they are represented in the buffer as cascading arrows leading to strange ao behavior.
Doesn't look too bad in game, but it's again something that can only be addressed by the TDM team.

 

Edited August 22, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide