Why Reshade over Gshade
Gshade isn't developed openly, was made to solve a problem with reshade that no longer exists, and the most important issue to most people is that it runs poorly.
Reshade has plugin support to enable things that Gshade can't do.
The only benefit of Gshade is that it's slightly easier to install.
Installing Reshade
Already on Gshade and wish to keep your presets? https://gist.github.com/ry00001/3e2e63b986cb0c673645ea42ffafcc26
To instead fresh install of Reshade (recommended):
Download ReShade 5.8.0 with full add-on support
https://reshade.me/#download or newer should work fine if there is newer than the time of writing.- Run the installer
- Browse and navigate to ffxiv_dx11.exe. Next.
- Select DirectX 10/11/12. Next.
- For effect packages: SweetFX, OtisFX by Otis Inf. Doesn't matter too much since I'm going to add a zip and you can add more later. Next.
- Open FFXIV and it'll prompt you to set up Reshade. Default to open should be Home key. I have rebound some of my hotkeys to be the same as Gshade's as I like those more.
- Disable the "Copy depth buffer before clear operations" setting if it isn't already.
- Do not enable performance mode on the bottom right. It will break many shaders.
You may want to change this input setting to behave more like Gshade's as well.
Look through all these settings and change them how you'd like.
Done! Installing Reshade is easy enough.
There are reports of some crashing on Reshade 5.7.0 with the FFXIV Plugin. If you are crashing with the FFXIV Plugin, try 5.6.0
If you see a preset you'd like and are missing shaders, you can always run the Reshade install again, select Modify
, supply the preset to the install there, and it will often download what's missing for you. If it is missing shaders, they were probably some gshade specific ones that you can find from https://kagamine.tech/shade/gshade.zip and https://kagamine.tech/shade/fixed_shaders.zip but I don't like dumping in all shaders to my folder because that makes it harder to find the invidual ones I really need and because many presets use very outdated and bad shaders that I'd never use.
With that out of the way: How to make FFXIV look nicer
My subjective opinion is that FFXIV's art style makes it hold up nicely as a modern game, it just looks bad in very high light, very low light, texture resolution is low, blocky shadows, FXAA is bad anti aliasing that makes everything blurry and dated looking, and its Ambient Occlusion,
These are easily fixable with:
- Eye Adaptation to help alleviate high light.
- Higher resolution texture pack mods
- Better anti aliasing
- Better Shadows Dalamud plugin
- Ray Traced Global Illumination(RTGI) or another improved modern Ambient Occlusion. RTGI also improves how it looks in low light
First, set appropriate base FFXIV settings
Step 1
System Configuration->Display Settings
Full Screen Mode Gamma Correction
must not be 50 or your screen will be dark. Change this to 49, 51, or anything from 35-49 might look good to you. I use 40 because my light bounce on RTGI is going to brighten things up a little.
Step 2
System Configuration->Graphics Settings
Use low-detail models on distant objects (LOD)
unchecked.
Edge Smoothing
Off. Removes FXAA, because it fixes jagged edges by... making everything blurry, which isn't a real fix for them. We will add CMAA2 and SMAA in Reshade.
Step 3
System Configuration->Graphics Settings again
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Off. This is FFXIV's bad AO. We'll replace it with a better one, or multiple ones.
Installing texture upscales
I think this is the most annoying part, but it is very worth it if you have the drive space! This can take many hours with all the downloading and extracting required.
https://downloads.kartoffels.club/Final%20Fantasy%20XIV/index.html
You need the main large files in the #.0 folders which are many GB. The few kb or mb ones are optional patches to fix some texture issues. If there is a 2.0 and 1.0, just download the 2.0.
You need the regular files like kart chara textures mob 2x v1-0-0.7z
not kart chara textures mob 2x for smartiez only v1-0-0.7z
.
4x textures are about 4x the file size as 2x. If you use all 4x, for gear, characters, mobs, world textures, everything, you may need a 12GB GPU or better.
2x should be fine on 8GB GPU. 4x on gear does look nice if you can.
If you are running out of VRAM, you can put the Gear upscales only on your character rather than the Default
collection. Enabling just Mobs on your character will also only upscale your mounts, I think.
If you have very little drive space free, I think Human and Gear are the most important ones, then Grass, and then Mobs because it improves mounts.
If you use Window's File History, disable it on these folders or you whole Penumbra mod directory as it uses a ton of space.
Extract downloads to your Penumbra mod folder. Use 7zip. Do not use winrar. Winrar will take hours to unpack.
Using Penumbra, enable them in your Default
collection.
Source for more detailed install instructions which is different than how you may normally install Penumbra mods.
If your Character's Collection does not already inherit from Default, enable it here. Or manually enable the equipment and human upscales for your character.
The tidy way to do it would be to have a "Character Name" collection which inherits from default and is assigned to your character.
Enable this collection on your character for mods you want to inherit Default like this.
Your Penumbra mod folder should have folders like these after you've extracted them there, depending on how many you install. I didn't bother with most patches except the Endwalker one. But if you notice a weird texture/transparency on something then that's why.
For the updates, those folders should be merged together with the patch files overwritting the contents they replace. There should not be two separate mods for one category or it will not work at all.
Then, as per the guide above, you click Rediscover Mods
in Penumbra and enable them. Set priority to -1 on them so your other mods will overwrite them. Disable other texture upscale packs if enabled, such as Hair Defined. Yes, Kart's texture upscales are far superior to Hair Defined's.
All these installed in my screenshot is 259GB.
Using 2x Equipment instead of 4x is around 170GB.
Note: Penumbra Redraw: All
will not work with world textures. You must leave and join the area again to reload the textures.
I also suggest dragging these into a Penumbra folder to keep things tidy!
Reshade plugin and new shaders
A new plugin for Reshade can give shaders more information they usually don't have for effects. It makes Reshade more specific for FFXIV and lets programmers write shaders that interface with the rendering in a less generic way for more modern features.
Examples: better emissive light glow, world normals, separating water (for reflections), rendering the UI separately on top. This way you don't get glowy lights and fog getting shadow over top of them as they get applied before those effects.
While the game is closed...
- Download RTGI 0.36.1 from... where you can find it. Install it by copying the folders into your FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\game\reshade-shaders\ folder. Do not use a more recent version at this time.
- Download Alex133's shader pack and addon, both here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1072579514879721542/1097268488134987917/dist2.0.4.zip
2b. Also download this new addon pack for Reshade 5.9+ and FFXIV 6.5 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1072579514879721542/1158734261692674129/dist2.0.7.zip?ex=652e7660&is=651c0160&hm=b519bcdfe3f23b483267ae0be4727d76383520d8ebd56e6a92f8f849a896ed20& - Shaders and Textures folders From dist2.0.4.zip go in FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\game\reshade-shaders3b. The .ini and .addon64 from dist2.0.7.zip go in FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\game5. Run
patch_qUINT.bat
which is now in your Shaders folder. If you do not want to run an exe you don't know anything about, you can replace the patch.exe with one from MinGW I think. - Launch the game and open Reshade overlay(Home by default)->Add-ons tab-> Uncheck "Copy depth buffer before clear operations" if you haven't already
- Enable the Reshade Shader Effect Toggler under Add-ons if it isn't already. Will require a game restart.
Antialiasing
Antialiasing reduces jagged edges.
FFXIV's FXAA does this poorly by basically blurring everything.
CMAA2 and SMAA are the only two worth mentioning that I'm aware of.
Everyone seems to swear by CMAA2. It's fast and quite good but I see small amounts of pixel flickering with it so I prefer SMAA. SMAA is also pretty fast.
The downside of SMAA is that it can antialias details that it shouldn't, but you can tweak it more.
CMAA2:
Simply search for CMAA2
under the Home
tab, move to top, and enable it. Moving to the top is for organization here, but shader order does also matter and the top most shaders run first.
Clicking a shader opens its variable configuration at the bottom. You only have 2 things you can change on CMAA, and I would increase CMAA2_STATIC_QUALITY_PRESET
to 3.
SMAA
Repeat the enable steps above but for SMAA
.
Edge Detection Threshold
: 0.050. The default 0.1 misses some edges for me but lowering this from the 0.100 default is going to smooth more that it shouldn't.
Enable Predicated Thresholding
: Enable. This removes some things it shouldn't be smoothing.
Prediction Strength
: 1.0. Too low removes more edges that it should be smoothing, though this will increase the amount it shouldn't smooth, I think it's better to have more false positives than more jagged edges missed.
Eye adaptation
FFXIV also has this already but it doesn't work well. This is very easy to mess up and get weird results with.
Using this helps alleviate the problems of how a preset or shader may look good in low light, but it's blown out in high light. Or it looks good in high light, but is too dark in low light.
Most of the time this will do nothing, and that's a good thing! You just want it to alleviate the overly bright and dark scenes. Be careful of losing a decent night sky look by brightening shadows too much. It should mostly be midtones that get adjusted.
Enable and move EyeAdaptation
up
Y Axis Focal Point
: 0.25. This moves the area it's searching for tone up above your character.
Brighten Highlights
: 0.000-0.100. There can often be already very bright areas in otherwise dark areas so I wouldn't have this be too high.
Brighten Midtones
: 0.230-0.350. This and Darken Midtones are the main ones you want to have adjusting.
Brighten Shadows
: 0.000. Having this be higher can make the night sky be grey since it can't tell the difference between shadow and black.
Darken Highlights
: 0.00. Turning this up can have weird effects like white screen flashes during some raids being grey instead. This is the opposite problem of Brighten Shadows.
Darkener Midtones
: 0.200-0.300.
Darken Shadows
: 0.100.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient Occlusion basically adds shadows where edges meet.
A lot of bad AO will basically look like there is a black dropshadow behind everything, though there are reasons you might want that style.
Vanilla FFXIV's AO has the problem of often adding big splotches to characters, though it is decent on the landscape.
I was trying to find an AO that is similar to FFXIV's but better that didn't require the plugin, but I just can't. I think there was one called FFXIV MXAO but I couldn't find it.
Use XeGTAO which means you need to install the above correctly since the add-on is required. It's very good and worth the hassle!
Enable FFXIV_XeGTAO
and FFXIV_XeGTAO_Decals
beneath that. Your enabled shaders should now look like this.
Effect Radius
: 2.0
Effect Radius Multiplier
: 1.0
Effect Falloff Range
: 1.0
Final Value Power
: 3.0
Thin Occular Compensation
: 0.70. This helps keep foreground objects from shading things behind them in an unrealistic way.
You may want to play with these above settings, but those settings look closest to how FFXIV HBAO+ is normally to me while being better in various ways.
Light Avoidance
: Enabled if not using RTGI or a bloom like solaris. Disabled if using RTGI.
XE_GTAO_IL
: 1. This will then enable Indirect Light Intensity
. There is a bug in the current reshade that will crash if you later change this back to 0. Us Indrect Light Intensity
0.0 instead.
Indirect Light Intensity
: 1.5-3.0. I would drop this to a low amount or off if using RTGI as well. This is like reverse AO, adding some extra highlights. It looks really nice imo.
XE_GTAO_QUALITY_LEVEL
: 3
Better Shadows
Download and enable the Dalamud mod Better Shadows
. This makes the shadows sharper and flicker less.
Uncheck Enable Custom Cascade Values
.
With this all done, your game will look Vanilla except higher quality as if Square Enix gave their own HD textures pack option, better antialiasing, and AO.
...
Todo add comparison pictures
RTGI(Ray Traced Global Illumination)
RTGI tries to ray trace game light the best it can in the limitations of just being in Reshade. It provides much more accurate ambient occlusion than other AO shaders, and it also tends to add a bit more vibrancy from bleeding colors with light bouncing.
This is going to deviate from looking like vanilla FFXIV, but it can look incredibly nice at times.
Part of why makes RTGI so nice is that it enhances what is already there, rather than overwriting it with false color correction that many shaders do.
You will need to enable these three shaders. Motion vectors helps reduce the ghosting.
How to tweak shaders
Todo
I'll write how to tweak some key shaders to achieve better results and which variables are noteworthy.
IE, use near Depth of Field(DoF) to hide blocky models and low res textures up close, and because it's more realistic.
Avoid high DoF for far distance if you chose a nice background for your shots! A very slight amount of background blur so it's not ultra crisp is realistic and looks nice.
Fog is heavily underused and can be great! I'm not very good with it but I'm going to try and learn so I can write about it here.
RTGI(Ray Traced Global Illumination)
Todo
qUINT_Solaris
Todo
A nice bloom shader.
ADOF
Decent Depth of Field that runs fast enough to use during gameplay with a decent GPU. The ingame cutscenes can look really nice with this, I think.
Cinematic DOF
Todo
Highest quality DoF, but slow.
Updating a Gshade preset you like with improvements, and fixing old issues they tend to have
Todo
This will go over how you can keep the look you like from a given older GShade preset you like, but adapt it to utilize the FFXIV plugin and RTGI.
xivmodarchive and nexushub now typically have Reshade presets published instead of Gshade which you should browse through. Almost none of these will be using the FFXIV plugin, though, since it's just not that easy to install yet. Make your own presets if you can.