If you’re a PC gamer, chances are you owe at least one of your modding exploits to ReShade, and just yesterday released version 4.6 on the official open-sourced GitHub repository. ReShade is arguably the platform that many modders begin their post-processing work on for a wild variety of PC titles and gained wild popularity with Bethesda’s Skyrim, along with The Witcher 3 and various other titles that offer at least the ability to turn the graphics into something far more immersive than what the developers can initially offer.
Reshade was initially released back on GitHub on December 24, 2014, and was developed by a user known on GitHub as ‘crosire’. The objective of the application was relatively simple to explain; it would inject new parameters into executables on the PC, which could drastically alter how the game looked.
Boosting a titles’ graphical fidelity via the injector allowed for a large swath of modifications to be created by the community that would offer various levels of color exposure, alter the depth of field, or even adds ambient occlusion onto titles that never supported the options in the first place.
#ResidentEvil3 | #VirtualPhotography #ReShade
Camera tools by https://t.co/8ZYDCI0DrC pic.twitter.com/HRUbDpsSyE— Eul Keke (@Eul_keke) April 9, 2020
Granted, it’s not necessarily the simplest software to incorporate into various titles; users need to balance various libraries getting added to the basic game file hierarchy, extracting various specific files from a zip, and then finally downloading a ReShade preset from modders.
This all gets balanced on top for your already precarious tower of mods and retextures that are able to change your game from a blurry mess to an 8K parallax-enabled next-generation that is as pretty as your rig can personally handle. A brief search on NexusMods shows that over 1,000 mods utilize the software-injector across a variety of titles.
With such a direct effect on modders and titles for the past six years, it’s a case of wildly popular user-created software that frankly doesn’t get too much support for how often it’s used by PC gamers, as it inevitably ends up yet another tool in the surprisingly deep toolbox for those that have the desire and competence to explore a bit beyond their comfort zones.
ReShade entered the open-source realm on January 1, 2017, that allowed users to help contribute to the software moving forward to ensure that development would continue well into the future.
The latest patch offers roughly sixty fixes and alterations that will improve how ReShade runs in a variety of environments, from Resident Evil 3 to Valkyria Chronicles. If you’re using it in your current titles, it would be wise to head over to GitHub and pick up the newest version.
