An overhaul of the game’s rendering features, including updated screen space shadows, updated shading for a variety of materials, adjusted auto exposure, controls for bloom, lens flares, chromatic aberration, sharpening, and more. Also rewrites the tone mapping pipeline for SDR and HDR to drastically improve visuals and offer extensive controls.
A graphics mod for Crimson Desert built on the RenoDX framework. Made by Forge, Jon (Kickfister), and ShortFuse. Uses the ReShade Addon system, but is not a ReShade Preset!
Requirements:
https://reshade.me/downloads/ReShade_Setup_6.7.3_Addon.exe
Tone Mapping
– In HDR, Choose between Vanilla (ACESv2) or the custom PsychoV-17 psychovisual tone mapper
– In SDR, Black Crush Fix corrects gamma mismatch that crushes black levels on gamma 2.2 displays
Color Grading
Fine-tune the look of the game with manual sliders:
– Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, Saturation
Local Lighting
– Flame Hue Correction: Corrects pink/red flame and torch hues toward warm orange/yellow
– Flame Saturation: Adjusts saturation of local light sources, independent of other grading settings
Auto Exposure
– Base game auto exposure has significant drawbacks
– Aggressive dimming or over brightening
– Nights are overly bright becasue of how the game uses auto exposure as a lighting solution rather than a post process
– By extension, the game lacks “actual” lighting via bounced GI or local light sources in interiors and instead relies heavily on auto exposure to do the lifting
– Alternative Auto Exposure: makes nights genuinely dark and fixes blown-out interiors. Modes: Off / Custom / Custom Perceptual
– Custom Perceptual: Completely replaces the base game auto exposure with a new metering based system that doesnt use sky visibility, interior/exterior based vanilla code. Should be smoother and solve vanilla auto exposure limitations
– Disable Auto White Balance: prevents per channel AWB from causing hue shifts depending on auto exposure and viewing angles
– Disable Hero Lights: removes artificial fill lights applied to characters
Effects
– Film Grain: switch between vanilla and a new perceptual grain that reduces banding (adjustable strength)
– Chromatic Aberration: scale down or disable entirely (default: off)
– Sharpening: choose between vanilla or RCAS (robust contrast adaptive sharpening), adjustable strength (default: off)
– Lens Flare: scale or disable lens flare effects
– Bloom: scale or disable bloom
– Vignette: slider
Rendering
– Spectral Sky Scattering: replaces vanilla RGB Rayleigh scattering with Garcia Linan spectral atmospheric scattering
– Sun & Moon Improvements: physically based sun rendering; moon brightness reduced to reveal surface texture detail
– Moon Disk Size: scale the moon from 1× up to 10× vanilla size
– Grass/Foliage Improvements: Improved contact shadows, reducing overly dark base shadowing, added AO and foliage transmission
– Dawn/Dusk Improvements: Adds directionality to both sky scattering and GI during these ToD. Base game sky probes are rather low res and uniformly apply GI. This causes rather flat looking sunrise/sunset whilst also introducing situations where 7PM has brighter GI compared to 4-5PM
– Snow Fog Fix: Regions that contain both snow and have thick fog cause an issue where the mie forward scattering from the sun direction (which is view dependant) massively increases the amount of energy in a scene. This causes major swings in sky brightness and since the sky probe is linked to atmospheric scattering, this also causes changes to GI. Looking towards the sun and turning the camera away can completely change the look of a scene with lighting pop in
– Distortion Noise Fix: This is a very low res / quality distortion VFX thats applied whilst in motion. Can’t say for certain what Pearl was attempting here but it utterly degrades visuals into pixelated mosaics. No op’ed the shader so it visually doesnt apply. No need for reshade toggler or slider for this one, it is packaged as part of RenoDX
The following have been grouped into a “Material Improvement” toggle
– Diffuse BRDF: Replaced base game’s Burley + Lambert + retroreflection term mix to use EON 2025
– Smooth Terminator: softens hard light/shadow boundary on geometry
– Specular Anti Aliasing: eliminates specular shimmer on distant surfaces + restores previously nuked specular
– Diffraction: adds spectral hue fringing to metallic specular highlights + soft speckles to certain metals
– Disable VRS: forces full resolution shading, disabling the game’s Variable Rate Shading for various shaders to improve VFX quality (seems to have a very minimal perf cost and slightly increases quality)
WIP Rendering
RT Improvements: to bounced lighting and sampling. Has a limitation of increasing noise/boiling so is WIP / only recommended for Screenshotting purposes in interiors with alt auto exposure that is darker than base game
Presets
– Recommended: Curated settings tested at max quality with Ray Reconstruction
– Vanilla: Restores all rendering settings to match the unmodified game + only uses RenoDX PsychoV-11 for tonemapping / grading improvements
Instructions
– Install ReShade 6.7.3 with add-on support (don’t need to select any shaders or addons in the setup)
– Copy renodx-crimsondesert.addon64into the game’s bin64 folder (the same folder where you installed Reshade).
– Run the game and access the ReShade UI with . Select the Add-ons tab and disable `Generic Depth` and `Effect Runtime Sync`, then restart.
– After restarting, press
– < HOME > on your keyboard to access the Reshade UI and configure the settings.
Compatibility
– VAXIS’s Ground LOD tested with the Shadow version. It doesnt introduce shader permutations so works fine with RenoDX. Helps to improve Dynamic Cascade “Far” shadow flickering/jittering (these are dynamic shadows that are more than 6 metres in front of the player). Will not solve other shadow related flickering such as those from screenspaced contact shadows, static shadows or terrain heightmap shadow judder during dawn/dusk transitioning.
– VAXIS’s Enhanced Internal Graphics 0.2 included changes two shaders related to sky atmospheric scattering. This means Dawn/Dusk Improvements + Snow Fog Fix will not work properly. We tried to view shaders for any permutation changes however there was no shader changes. SRVs/RTVs were also all using the same resolution for diffuse or specular GI. Can’t say the mod is doing much for RR graphics pathing at least. If you do want to use it, remove renderpassatmosphericscattering.xml to fix incompatibilities
– External DLLs/injections such as Optiscaler/SpecialK may not work, please test without them first to confirm whether the mod works without them. I can’t make any guarantees when it comes to compatibility in this case as all these mods and RenoDX hook into the game on a low level.
About RenoDX
RenoDX, short for “Renovation Engine for DirectX Games”, is a toolset to mod games. Currently, it can replace shaders, inject buffers, add overlays, and write user settings to disks. Because RenoDX uses Reshade’s add-on system, compatibility is expected to be pretty wide. Using Reshade simplies all the hook necessary to tap into DirectX without worrying about patching version-specific exe files.
