YouTube members ‘hodilton’, ‘EiermannTelevision’ and ‘Rare’ have released some new videos, showing Skyrim, Resident Evil 4 HD, Dark Souls 3 and Max Payne 3 with the alpha version of the Reshade mod that adds ray tracing/path tracing Global Illumination effects.
Created by Pascal Gilcher, this Reshade adds some really cool ray tracing/path tracing effects to pretty much all DX9, DX10 and DX11 games. Now contrary to the “real” ray tracing deal, this Reshade has some limitations. Since it is a post processing shader, this Reshade mod only uses depth information available in screen space in order to provide these “path tracing” effects. Furthermore, the Reshade does not have any data about the direction of the lighting and due some scenes can look a bit bizarre under certain circumstances.
Still, and as we’ve already said, for older titles this Reshade brings a noticeable visual upgrade. Max Payne 3 and especially Resident Evil 4 and Skyrim look significantly better with these ray tracing/path tracing Global Illumination effects. The environments in these games look more organic and appear to have more depth to them (they are not as flat as they look in their vanilla versions).
Perhaps the best example for this Reshade mod, though, is Dark Souls 3. Dark Souls 3 suffers from a really old-gen-ish lighting system and its interiors can look ugly. Thanks to this Reshade mod, however, the game almost comes close to the Dark Souls 2 version that FromSoftware showcased using an advanced lighting system (prior to the game’s release).
We are certain that a lot of older games will benefit from these ray tracing/path tracing Global Illumination effects that this Reshade brings to the table, so here is hoping that we get more video showcases for games like Need for Speed Underground, Doom 3, Far Cry, Alan Wake, Aliens: Colonial Marines and the first Assassin’s Creed games!
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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