YouTube’s ‘hodilton’ has shared a video, showing The Witcher 3 with Pascal Gilcher’s new alpha Reshade mod that adds path tracing/ray tracing GIobal Illumination effects to every DX9, DX10 and DX11 game.
Contrary to other videos we shared, The Witcher 3 is a newer title and we are really impressed by the visual improvement that this Reshade brings to it. As we’ve already said, there are some graphical glithes/issues with this alpha version of Reshade, however the visual improvement can be easily noticed.
There are also some limitations to this ray tracing/path tracing workaround. Given its post processing shader nature, the Reshade is only using depth information available in screen space in order to provide these “path tracing” effects. Furthermore, the Reshade does not know the light direction which may lead to some really bizarre scenes.
What this ultimately means is that this Reshade is not as perfect as NVIDIA’s real-time ray tracing techniques (or DXR if you prefer). On the other hand, it’s also not as demanding as real-time ray tracing and runs on every GPU, something that will definitely please a lot of gamers.
Still, we believe that this new version of Reshade can significantly improve the image quality of older titles, and we hope that Pascal Gilcher will further tweak it in order to resolve some of the aforementioned issues.
Last but not least, we’ve also included below a video showing this Reshade being used in Grand Theft Auto 5. We’ve shared a similar video in our previous story, however this one better illustrates the improvements that this Reshade brings to the table.
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.”
Contact: Email
There is no reason to use this on any modern game that has baked GI and some decent form of screen space AO.
It messes with existing lighting and makes a lot of mistakes due to the limited data it has access to.
The best part of this shader is the ray traced AO, the GI will never work well.
“There is no reason to use this on any modern game that has baked GI”
Doesn’t GTA 5 have some kind of GI system built in? If neither Witcher 3 nor GTA 5 have GI then there’s enough need for a GI solution as a post effect from those two games alone. Open world titles even when they have some kind of GI tend to have really poor lighting because of just how dynamic everything has to be.
I agree with your second point about the lack of information these Reshade effects have. That really is a shame and I doubt it can ever be improved unless future games start using some kind of universal standard for PBR materials that is accessible the same way the depth buffer is. Then the GI really could “work”. But where there’s no GI previously it already works well, it’s just not quite worth the performance impact yet.
>where there’s no GI previously it already works well
The shader has two parts: Ray traced SSAO, which is what gives you improved ambient occlusion/shading, then the GI. Most of the improvement you see is simply from the ray traced AO.
The GI has a lot of issues due to lack of scene data, thus it makes a lot of assumptions, you’re looking at someone’s hand picked examples and even then you see the glaring issues.
I’ve tried the shader myself and the GI is 100% unusable most of the time, even for screenshot purposes.
TBH things like this and Quake II RTX make a much more convincing argument for upgrading to an RTX card than any actual, modern RTX game for me. Still not enough to make me want to upgrade, but more appealing than official implementations.
This is a Reshade shader, it cannot use RT cores.
Do you want some bleach with that?
If the technique were implemented in the game natively it could take material qualities into account. Performance would be same or better, result would be MUCH better as reflectivity/smoothness and metalness would prevent those awkward moments like when Geralt lights up like a snowman while standing on snow. The shader seems to use some kind of compromise general reflectivity value for all surfaces and especially on cloth this looks really wrong.
The shader doesn’t know anything about reflective properties and it cannot discern between surfaces or objects, it only has access to the depth buffer as well as some color and brightness information, if a pixel is bright enough it’s treated as an emitter.
Interiors look great. Outdoors looks too much of a mixed bag.
In the interiors you’re mostly just seeing the effect of the ray traced AO.
You can toggle the GI separately in the shader.
Another attempt of trying to justify a bad purchase, and fails.
Bad purchase of what?
Of a feature that’s only being used by 3 games and poorly…it’s kinda sad that people have to make this “emulations” to use something that they paid a lot for it…guinea pigs.
Oh I see. Well the article says this is available for any card and it specifically can’t use Nvidia’s RT technology.. it’s the reshade that tries to emulate it.
That said.. I bought a brand new sealed 2080Ti for $500 3 days ago (I run a computer biz so people call me up selling equipment all the time) and it’s pretty flippin cool. But yeah, hard to justify at $1300+
speaking like a true peasant.
Buyer’s remorse: the comment.
IMO this is just never going to look good in motion. For screenarchery it can look great, but for actual gameplay outside of select scenes? Not so much.
vanilla is better in this case, at gta 5 made more sense