AMD Image Sharpering is integrated into ReShade, so it can run on NVIDIA graphics

Robert Sole 18 July 2019

1 1.733 2 reading minutes

AMD Radeon Image Sharpering is integrated into ReShade, allowing NVIDIA graphics to run this open source technology.

The new AMD Navi architecture graphics cards didn't come alone. These new graphics cards, among other things, have brought new technologies. Among them is Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS). We are talking about a filter to improve the detail in the frames. It offers us an adaptive contrast approach that is combined with GPU scaling. It would be something similar to NVIDIA DLSS.

This new technology is restricted to DirectX 9, DirectX 12 and Vulkan and of course, only compatible with AMD graphics. But they have managed to integrate this new technology into ReShade. ReShade is the solution to bring RayTracing to games that do not integrate it. This means that NVIDIA graphics users can also use AMD technology. Additionally Image Sharpering will work on DirectX 11 and OpenGL games.

Radeon Image Sharpering now also works with NVIDIA graphics

This integration has been possible thanks to the fact that RIS is an open source technology. This has allowed several developers to work on their code and add it to ReShade and then post it on Reddit. According to the ReShade developer, this will add a performance cost over the original version of ReShade. Explain that it is because the drivers are not designed for these types of instructions. It also highlights that ReShade does not support FP16 / RPM instructions. But it ensures that the impact on performance is not very great.

For AMD users, the advantage is that DirectX 11 support is built in through software support. This allows you to easily adjust the graphic settings from the control panel. Note that this mod is only compatible with games that already have ReShade integrated, available in many popular games.

If you want to mess with it, you must follow these steps:

Download ffx_a.h and ffx_cas.h from the GPUOpen repository (click on “Raw” just above, where the text that each file contains is displayed and then Ctrl-S to download it)
Download wrapper shader and save it as FidelityFX_CAS.fx (You must also carry out the step explained above)
Add the three files in the ReShade folder
We adjust the sharpness parameters as we like. AMD recommends leaving it at 0.0 to avoid artifacts, but we can adjust it to 1.0, to get more precision.