QUICK EXPLANATION
ReShade is a generic post-processing injector for games and video software mainly developed by crosire (www.reshade.me). What this means is that it hooks itself into the target software’s rendering process and adds own effects, which act as third party plugins. By itself, ReShade does not change any graphics, it provides an interface to add ray tracing, depth of field, color grading and more.
ReShade is compatible with almost all games! It can work on both 32- and 64-bit games, supporting Direct3D 9, 10, 12, OpenGL and Vulkan. Hence, shaders (effects) for ReShade can be transported from one game to another, and you can start tweaking any game’s graphics to your heart’s content even if it just came out.
From a more technical perspective, ReShade acts as a so-called wrapper for the game’s graphical interface. In case the game uses Direct3D 11 (DirectX 11), it would usually communicate with the original Direct3D 11 interface. ReShade replaces this interface, so the game communicates with ReShade instead, and ReShade hands over all communication to the actual rendering interface (so the game still works as normal) while adding own post-processing effects. ReShade features its own shading language called ReShade FX and a compiler, both of which have been integrated into NVIDIA Ansel and NVIDIA FreeStyle. Because of this, Ansel and FreeStyle are both able to load most effects/shaders written in ReShade FX.
ReShade is at the core of many graphics mods for games, especially if the game is difficult to modify by normal means, as its way of modifying the graphics is so universal.
