As I wrote in my PC Performance Analysis for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, something felt really wrong about its visuals, though I suspected that things would significantly improve with Reshade. And I was right as it appears that Reshade is a must-have for all PC gamers playing Ubisoft’s latest open-world title.
Below you can find some comparison screenshots between Reshade (left) and vanilla (right) on Very High settings (with Anti-Aliasing and Volumetric Clouds set at Low). As you will see, the game looks really blurry in its vanilla settings, making it look awful. Seriously, it’s like the game has been covered in vazeline (perhaps due to its AA solution? Even on High AA the image was way softer/blurrier than what it should have been).
I’ve also added SMAA (for a bit smoother edges) and increased overall saturation (because I like colorful visuals), however these are entirely optional and some may not fancy these changes. Still, we can all agree that a sharpening filter is a must for all playing on the PC (unless your TVs have by default a sharpening filter).
The downside here is that there is a noticeable performance hit when using Reshade (at least with our settings). In some cases we witnessed a 5-7fps hit, so those that cannot already maintain a smooth gaming experience may encounter performance issues.
Still, and as with Origins, Odyssey looks way, way, waaaaaaay better with Reshade enabled (at least in my opinion). And that’s actually the beauty of PC gaming; the ability to use various tools in order to bring a game’s visuals to our unique liking. And I just hope that the Reshade team will figure out a way in order to make this tool compatible with DX12 so we can use it with all the latest – and upcoming – DX12 games.
My Reshade settings were: Adaptive Sharpen set at 1.0, SMAA at default and Vibrance at 0.560.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Yup, night and day.
less fps with reshade so no thanks
Hmmm…..The visual difference is clearly visible !
Water is wet.
Seriously I use ReShade and Nvidia Game Filter (if available) for all my games to improve clarity, sharpness and to color correct.
Ok I definitely see the difference but this is not a hugely significant increase in fidelity. I noticed higher saturation, higher sharpness and AA and little else.
Overall the image looks clearer but this isn’t a massive difference. ReShade by definition isn’t capable of significant improvements because it’s just post processing and it only has access to a few buffers.
Why sacrifice 10 fps for a silly color correction? Just bump up digital vibrance to 100% in Nvidia Control Panel and use downscaling ingame.
He doesn’t know how to properly use ReShade, could achieve the same effect for the cost of 1 frame.
How to do that sir?
I just want SMAA
You have awful taste…. That sharpening shader is the worst. It looks like LumaSharpen just dialed up to the highest.
The only sharpening filter that looks good and natural in this game and Origins is FineSharp, but will hit your performance VERY hard. Otherwise, there’s no reason AT ALL that a sharpening mask that looks as terrible as the ones above should cost you 5-7 FPS
A recommendation, use the “FilmicAnamorphSharpen” shader that now comes with ReShade and lower the mask from 128 to 32. That’s about as good of a balance as you’re going to get in this game between sharp and natural without stepping into FineSharp which as I said, WILL hit your performance for AT LEAST 5-7 FPS, often times more.
ReShade in general doesn’t have to hurt performance these days though. You’re doing it wrong if you hit your performance that badly.
Yup, the problem with the game is some blurry textures, this fixes this. The visual quality is far higher.
Why sacrifice 10 fps for a silly color correction? Just bump up digital vibrance to 100% in Nvidia Control Panel and use downscaling ingame.
Well using a high end (editing) monitor the reshaded images look absolutely awful 🙁 I guess this reshade looks ok when monitors present fairly dull colours.
Agree, colors looks too saturated on his reshade screenshots. High sharpness settings is also nothing special, all HDTV use that feature and with much better results.
“high end monitor”
has a regular shetty ips monitor which is garbage for gaming
Once you go IPS you never go back.
IPS is trash, backlight bleed and awful black levels.
Short of OLED, the only thing that is good are VA type panels.
Indeed.
wrong in terms of quality
Are there OLED gaming monitors ?
There are few Models in the market I think, but they seem to be expensive.
The Dell UP3017Q, and one another upcoming model from ASUS, the ProArt PQ22UC (more to come soon).
I think Dell released the UP3017Q monitor with a price tag of $3,500, and the monitor is having a 60Hz refresh rate.
Cost has been the biggest hindrance, when it comes to OLED panels, apart from Burn-in/Color shifting which can happen as well.
Wow. OLED really is for wealthy people jesus.
It’s true, IPS Black levels are not as good as OLED, but then OLED suffers from burn in. Backlight bleed differs from panel to panel, don’t buy cheap panels. VA appears to be the peasant version of IPS?
OLED doesn’t really ‘burn in’ though you can get image retention. You’re only going to get that if you play sports/fighting games on the TV for 10 hours a day with no other content, however. Generally, ‘burn in’ isn’t something to worry about.
And 1000:1 native contrast ratios on ISP panels are peasant! Yes VA still has problems (no panel tech at the moment is perfect :'(), but 2500:1-3000:1 contrast ratios on VA can be quite stunning compared to IPS/TN!
Although at last we’re getting some gaming monitors with decent local dimming; they look quite interesting too!
It’s not such a massive problem where you should worry about it when buying a display though. I’d say you should be aware of it, yes, but as long as you’re not running the same type of content for 16 hours a day at a high OLED light level it shouldn’t be something to worry about.
If you’re going to game on it for 2-4 hours a day, from what I’ve read it’s not anything to worry about.
i’m not touching any garbage monitor that has lower frequency than 144hz. you can be an autistic nerd and jack off to colors but i’m not touching anything lower than 144hz
I’m sure that made sense in your head.
i’m sure at some point you will grow some iq points and understand.
lul
disable the AA as it seems they are using TXAA and everything will be fine
i never use txaa
and disable motion blur
The game already looked vibrant as hell.
Vanilla looks so much better. My eyes burn with that exaggerated sharpness and saturation.
Agreed.
Performance hit??no thanks..my GPU has suffer enough..
You made it look worse, gz 🙂
Okay, come on JOHN, can you guys Moderate the comment section, and clean it “at least” from the SPAM bots ?
These copy/paste bots keep spawning under every Topic, and it’s kind of frustrating to read the same comment being posted again and again.
Others can mistake the bot as the OP as well.
I can understand the website’s “Unrestrained Policy”, but does this apply when it comes to these spam bots as well ?
The forum moderators should at least ‘delete’ such comments, which are being copy/pasted, to reduce any clutter/confusion, IMO. And yes, I’ve already flagged them as Spam, but the comments are still active. What gives ? 😀
The purpose of those bots might be to confuse moderators and get the original comments removed instead of the spam ones.
should be easy for someone with privileges to see which post came first. two posts of the same kind? delete the younger one. repeat until only one version of each post is left. even a bot could do this.
If you want to save performance then use LumaSharpen. Only costs 1 extra frame. AdaptiveSharpen is a bit more demanding.
The problem with LumaSharpen is that it alters the color of the pixels when you sharpen them. AdaptiveSharpen, on the other hand, is more advanced and adds proper sharpening.
I don’t really see a difference.
Noticeable performance hit for some unwanted graphical effects. You should be working at Nvidia.
Far too much color saturation for my taste.
Are you joking John? *Significant
Please learn modulation and to top it off this is a pretty poor reshade.
The crazy sharpening totally breaks the immersion imo
Prostagma?
I Use Nvidia Gamefilter instead. It looks amazing and a lot of easy configurable tools.