This the item you can vote for:
[BUG/FEATURE] Provide a Sharpen strength setting, and more post-processing effect controls in VR
I’ve been looking at ReShade which now has a beta version interposing (DLL proxy) in order to capture the render views and post-process them, but I didn’t take any time recompiling nor testing because there is still an issue with these and I believe even more so in VR with the panels having a limited color gamut compared to a monitor (although the G2 gamut seems quite good, at least better than the Index).
The main problem with post-processing tools is you’re altering the sRGB discrete values. Any change in gain or level inherently reduces the signal precision. In other words, say you want to reduce luminosity:
- output from sim is a value between 0 and 255
- middle luminosity level is 127 in sRGB, but 18% in CIE (not the same range before and after!)
- you post-process to reduce luminosity value down to 127 (1/2 luminosity)
- you only have 128 values available to display from black to white instead of 256 initially
- this produces banding artefacts because of the lower color signal resolution.
This means to be effective, any such post-processing must be done at the tone mapper level in the game pixel shader code. Honestly it is not difficult to add and takes a few minutes* (unless the pixel shader code is so complex but even so, at the end, all game pixels go though the tone mapper):
- the post process is done on values from -1 to +1 (floating point values)
- you reduce the luminosity in the linear space
- once tone mapped, it accurately represents the reduced luminosity
- you still have 256 discrete signal values from black to white.
*What I mean with “in a few minutes” illustrated: my own mod to XP11 Shaders (prior they change them to binary format). It will show you what the tone mapper is and why this matters (and how simple the code to change luminosity or color gain is deceptively simple while at it):