How to make ReShade effects work in VR (Patreon)

Today I'd like to talk about a little-known feature of the mod.

My modding framework, as you can read about in the "Legal" tab of the overlay, is based on the wonderful ReShade injector by Crosire. In my early releases (before 2.1.3 that is) I had to disable its built-in effect system though, because it would operate on the backbuffer drawn on the display monitor instead of the images sent to the VR headset. That meant that when using the effects you would have to pay the GPU performance cost only to make the image on the monitor better, with no visible improvement in VR.

Beginning with release 2.1.3 of the mod, however, I made the many changes needed to have the effect system operate directly on the VR images, so it's now enabled and fully working.

If you're already familiar with ReShade 4.9.1, you will find all the controls you know in the usual places, except that the "Home" overlay tab is now called "ReShade" and that I slightly rearranged the "Overlay" tab to make it less intimidating for users who are only interested in VR settings.

The R.E.A.L. mod does not come with presets and common shaders/effects preinstalled, since they're not my work. However, I collected all the latest versions for your convenience into a .zip archive that I'm attaching to this (public) post. Again, please note that I'm not the creator of these shaders, and all credits for them go the respective authors.

If you want to use ReShade effects, just unzip the archive into the game executable folder (the same one where you extracted my mod), so that the newly created "reshade-shaders" subfolder ends up at the same level as RealConfig.bat. As usual, pay close attention not to create an extra subfolder level: you want to get ".\reshade-shaders\REFERENCE​.md", and not ".\reshade-shaders\reshade-shaders\REFERENCE​.md".

Effects that are nested into subfolders won't be found and loaded automatically. The mod is preconfigured to look only into ".\reshade-shaders\Shaders" for effects and ".\reshade-shaders\Textures" for textures. If you want to load further shaders, like the AstrayFX family, you'll need to add the search paths yourself from the "Effects" section of the "Overlay" tab: for instance in this case you would add ".\reshade-shaders\Shaders\AstrayFX".

Important: NEVER run another copy of ReShade at the same time to implement further effects. If you know what you're doing and want to add more shaders or presets, just drop them into the existing folders and/or add them to the search paths. As a matter of fact, having another copy of ReShade hooking the game, especially for RDR2, is one of the most frequent issues that can kill your fps in VR and for which I receive lots of support requests.

If you find a combination of effects and parameters that works well with your game and/or your system, please share it in the comments so it may help other users <3