QUINT

qUINT

OVERVIEW

qUINT is a collection of graphical effects for ReShade, designed to condense most of ReShade’s use cases into a high quality, high performance set of of shaders. State of the art effects normally found in image or video editing tools at your fingertips, transforming your games in realtime.

Its key design concept is based off the observation that many ReShade presets use a long sequence of effects whose tasks overlap, making preset authoring difficult, degrading the dynamic range of the images due to repeated storages which also incur a small base cost, hence splitting the work among many effects results in a loss of performance. 20 different multitools or a box with many screwdrivers are both highly redundant and cannot handle many workloads, so clearly a well-picked set of a few high quality powertools is easier to work with, more flexible and efficient.

This is what qUINT aspires to be.

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EXPLANATION

RTGI

The widely known screen-space ray tracing shader for ReShade. Highest quality screen-space lighting using latest rendering technology.

MXAO

A versatile, custom screen-space ambient occlusion effect (SSAO) and among the most popular effects for ReShade. In 3D graphics, creating realistic lighting is a big contributor to immersion. SSAO and derived solutions like SSDO, HDAO, HBAO(+) are approaches to simulate diffuse shading in occluded areas, such as below cars, in dark corners and crevices. A simple lighting system, when paired with an AO effect, is already sufficient to create a convincing scene illumination. While most new games feature SSAO in one form or another, many games contain inferior or slow implementations of this effect, old games lack them altogether. MXAO is a high performance, highly flexible SSAO integration with support for SSDO-esque bounce lighting. Its rich quality and performance tweaking options allow it to meet many different requirements. Many ReShade users employ it as a replacement to game-native SSAO effects.

ReGrade

A powerful and highly optimized color grading toolset for color correction and stylization of game scenes. Most presets for ReShade employ a vast array of simple color effects with detrimental effects on performance, visual quality and maintainability. ReGrade offers a well-integrated set of industry-standard color grading operators with enough flexibility to manage everything between simple color saturation control and complex grading profiles. A well-structured UI keeps it beginner friendly while still being able to handle all color operations in a single effect. If Adobe Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve are sufficient for most image and video editors, then ReGrade is sufficient for you.

Physical DOF

As the name implies, physical DOF is a physically based simulation for depth of field – or camera out-of-focus effects. Realtime renderers as found in many games use a pinhole lens model, which renders everything equally sharp, this is of course in direct conflict with how aperture based cameras (and eyes!) create their images, and most games employ effects to reintroduce characteristics of images created with real cameras for improved realism and visuals. Physical DOF accurately simulates out of focus blurring based on realistic camera parameters and its rich configuration options allow to imitate a wide array of different depth of field appearances (“bokeh“).

Solaris

A new type of HDR exposure adjustment and bloom/image glow that is designed to integrate with ReGrade but can also operate on its own. Its tone-preserving HDR simulation allows to set the scene while ReGrade elevates it. Physically correct and energy conserving are some technical buzzwords that accurately describe it.

Clarity

Does what it says on the box. In the age of game developers cheating physics by rendering most of the image in lower resolution and using tech like TAA and DLSS, many games tend to have a slight blur to them. While recent implementations close the gap to native content very well, older versions tend to lose contrast in textures or high fidelity structures. Clarity dynamically increases (or decreases) contrast without causing halos or flickering edges as regular sharpening often does.
Using a foreground/background separation, a hazy background can be combined with a tack sharp, crisp foreground. Combined with DELC, skin textures can be enhanced via frequency separation, softening the skin with negative Clarity and bringing back pores with sharpen.

DELC Sharpen

My own spin of image sharpening. Even though driver level sharpening is now ubiquitous, it happens at the end of the game rendering and prior to ReShade’s effect sequence, interfering with its effects down the line. As sharpen tries to bring back details that are lost, the choice between the wide array of sharpen effects for ReShade is down to performance choice and perceptual preference.

Deband

Fast resolve for blocky gradients. One of the key reasons for the advent of HDR screens is the observation that the regular 8 bit color range of computer screens is not sufficient for smooth image gradients when paired with high resolutions. Normally, color gradients are dithered to use a mix of differently colored pixels so the eye blends them together into colors in between that the screen cannot display, e.g. grey can be displayed with a mix of black and white pixels.
However, if the game does not employ dithering and/or the color range is stretched by color grading, stairstepped gradients appear as stripes of uniformly colored areas.
Debanding detects these areas and resolves them by swapping pixels from each side of the color band while leaving other image detail intact. This can rescue otherwise ruined images at the price of moderate noise.

(Legacy) ADOF

An older, more painterly out-of-focus “bokeh” blur implementation and one of the key initial components of ReGrade. Deprecated in favor of Physical DOF. Missing features are being remade and carried over as many presets depend on this effect and an in-place rewrite would break many presets.

(Legacy) Lightroom

The precursor to ReGrade. Deprecated.

(Legacy) Bloom

The precursor to Solaris. Deprecated.

(Legacy) SSR

A basic screen-space reflections effect. As mirror reflections expose flawed object details and ReShade is mising accurate material information – which thus causes SSR to make everything glossy – its use case is highly limited. For better and more physically correct results, use RTGI instead.

GAMESHOWCASES

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