YouTube’s members ‘Digital Dreams’ and ‘EiermannTelevision’ has shared some videos, showing Halo: Combat Evolved, the first Watch Dogs game and Manhunt with Reshade Ray Tracing. These videos are using the alpha version of Pascal Gilcher’s Reshade mode; a mod that adds cool ray tracing/path tracing effects to pretty much all DX9, DX10 and DX11 games.
Now as we’ve said and before, this Reshade ray tracing/path tracing is not as accurate or great as DXR or what most modern-day games will be using. Due to the way Reshade works, this mod only uses depth information available in screen space in order to provide these “path tracing” effects. This can result in graphical glitches or shadow pop-ins when the camera pans out that have not been fixed yet.
Still, the good news here is that this Reshade mod actually benefits these three games as they’ve been using a really old lighting system (well, with the exception of Watch_Dogs). Halo: Combat Evolved has new shiny surfaces and lighting bounce all over the place, something that greatly improves the game’s visuals. The game still uses the old assets but we can safely say that it looks better than ever on the PC thanks to these Ray Tracing effects.
Surprisingly enough, Watch_Dogs also benefits from this Reshade Ray Tracing/Path Tracing mod. Watch_Dogs uses a lighting system that supports a real-time day/night cycle, so we weren’t expecting much. However, the game uses a lot of light sources (that obviously do not bounce on different surfaces) and the visual improvement can be easily noticed at times. Not only that, but thanks to the E3 mod Watch_Dogs can finally come really close to what Ubisoft showcased back in E3 2012 (though there is still not way to get those gorgeous explosions).
Last but not least, Manhunt is a mixed bag. While the game does not look as flat as its vanilla version, it looks way more dark-ish than before. This is mainly due to the lack of various light sources throughout the game’s level/levels. Still, it’s a cool concept that may interest some of you.
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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