The ReShade post-processing effects modification that enables gamers to play with fake-HDR, color correction, improved sharpness, or after-effect anti-aliasing, has grown into a huge tool with so many options it can often impact the loading times of the games they're being applied to. At least until now. The latest version, ReShade 4.9.0 has a new effects cache system, which means that once you've compiled your effects for a game one time, they're better stored, so don't have to be recompiled every time you load that game.
ReShade has evolved over the years into something quite special. Where once a little color and contrast tweaks were possible, today there are heaps of effects which can have a dramatic effect on how a game looks and feels. It's also a great antidote for games that are a little under-saturated, or leverage too much volumetric fog. It's even being used in some games to offer a much more lightweight path tracing lighting alternative to RTX-driven ray tracing.
All of these effects add to the compiling time, however, which can mean game load times add anywhere from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds in the most extreme of cases. With the new ReShade effects cache, however, those times are cut to almost zero after the first compiling. If you make changes to your effect choice then you'll need to redo it all, but once you've settled on a configuration you like, you're set.
In other ReShade news, it now works a little better on Cyberpunk 2077, with fewer performance hitches (save for those in the game itself) and is now compatible with gamers still playing on Windows 7 — which you really shouldn't, as it's totally unsupported by Microsoft now.
What effects do you like to use on ReShade and which games do you apply it to most often?
