Troubleshooting - martymcmodding/ReShade-Guide GitHub Wiki

Identifying the Problem

When you run into any issues with ReShade, it is important to identify the problem correctly. This page will assist you with that.

ReShade startup overlay does not show up when the game launches

Cause: Something in the installation went wrong. Games will not load ReShade if the DLL is in the wrong location or the wrong rendering API was selected.

Solution: Research again what API the game uses and rerun the installation tool. Note that some games can switch between the rendering APIs such as Red Dead Redemption 2, which supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan. If the game is set to Vulkan in the options, it will ignore any DirectX library. In any case, an online search for this specific game + ReShade usually gives you the required information. This wiki won't cover specific games, because there are too many.

Appendix: Games on the Source Engine require special treatment, e.g. Half-Life 2. Navigate to the game folder and find where the game .exe file is. ReShade should be next to it (either ``d3d9.dllordxgi.dll`). Copy or move this DLL to the `bin` subfolder in the same location. So for Half-Life 2, the game executable is at ..\Half-Life 2\hl2.exe , the correct place for ReShade is in ..\Half-Life 2\bin\ .

ReShade crashes the game at launch

Cause: The causes can be numerous and it's rarely evident what happened. Possible Solution:

  • For games that use DX10 or higher, there are two different DLL names ReShade can have (see ReShade primer for more information). One is the all-purpose dxgi.dll, meaning all games using DirectX 10 or higher will load ReShade when it is renamed to dxgi.dll. This is also what the ReShade installer does by default, it places the ReShade DLL into the game folder and renames it to dxgi.dll for DX10+. However, there are alternate API interface names for each platform, d3d10.dll for DirectX 10, d3d10.1 for DirectX 10.1, d3d11.dll for DirectX 11 and so on. So if the game uses DirectX 11, ReShade will have renamed the ReShade DLL to dxgi.dll. To rename ReShade, find the dxgi.dll inside the game folder and give it the correct name (see PC Gaming Wiki if you are not sure).

Shaders appear red in the list

Cause: Shader compilation failed. The causes for that are numerous. Possible Solutions:

  • If all shaders appear red in the GUI, this indicates that the ReShade.fxh is missing. There are a few functions that every shader requires and instead of everyone implementing their own versions of it, most shader authors agreed to use one single shader module that almost every shader loads, the ReShade.fxh. To fix this, download the ReShade.fxh from the official ReShade repository - make sure to click this button to fetch the entire shader repository (some users download the website source code instead of the shaders):
  • If a single shader does not compile, there are a few possible reasons. You might be using an outdated version of ReShade. Or the shader has a bug. In this case, get in touch with the developer and ask for help.
  • ReShade also shows you what exactly went wrong. Either inspect the log or hover with your mouse over the red colored effect. Analyzing the error message can tell you what is wrong. If you see a huge list of errors, this indicates that the file formatting went wrong, e.g. you saved a website as a shader whose contents are obviously wildly different to valid shader code. In this case, properly download the shader and replace the faulty one (see Installing Custom Shaders ).

Shader does not work

Cause: There are several ways in which a shader does "not work". But this is usually the way this question is phrased, but in order to fix this, it's important to find out what happened. We will assume that "the shader does not work" means you enabled it in the GUI and it did not change anything.

Possible Solutions:

  • The effect might have its control knobs set to neutral. Examples would be a saturation shader with the saturation control at 0 (negative values desaturate, positive values saturate). Check the control knobs for the enabled effect in the lower part of the Home tab and play around with them.
  • The shader might require depth buffer access - many ReShade shaders do. If ReShade could not find the correct depth buffer, the shader might not produce any visible output, or make the screen black, or blur it completely - basically the same problem happening on the entire screen. An example would be MXAO - if the depth buffer is empty, MXAO cannot find any geometry features to generate shadows from. Read more here about how to fix this.
  • If the output looks ugly, the effect control knobs might be set to something strange. Here's where the tweaking part comes in - no effect looks perfect out of the box and some preset authors spend months perfecting their settings. Play around with the knobs and see if that improves the result. Or the shader is simply not well made - everyone can program shaders for ReShade and just as there are good games and bad games, there are good and bad shaders. If you have your mind set on a specific effect, search online for a better alternative.
  • If there are obvious graphical bugs, this might be a bug of the shader. The easiest way to get this fixed is contacting the developer - not from ReShade, but from the shader.

No shaders appear in the list

Cause: ReShade could not find any shader files in the specified folders - or there are no folders specified.

Solution: See installing custom shaders to find out how to point ReShade to your shaders.