The Sharper Eye - a lightweight VR ReShade preset

The Sharper Eye

A ReShade build and preset for Skyrim VR

Skyrim's temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) does a good job of fighting jagged edges, especially in motion, but it comes at the price of a blurrier image. This is especially noticeable in VR where the whole image can look a touch out of focus. But there is a solution: a sharpening filter can restore much of the lost sharpness due to TAA without sacrificing the anti-aliasing effect, resulting in a much clearer and stable image. Unfortunately, Skyrim's built-in TAA sharpening is sub-par, so we need an external tool for sharpening.

Previously, for Skyrim VR you had the choice between using the Contrast Adaptive Sharpener for ENB or my own OpenVR injector approach at Contrast Adaptive Sharpening for VR that I originally developed for Fallout 4 VR. Recently, the general-purpose post-processing injector ReShade has gained support for OpenVR games, and while there hasn't been a new official build with VR support, yet, I'm providing a custom build here along with a basic preset for sharpening and color adjustment that I believe is superior to the previous options: it has a minimal performance overhead, and its settings can be configured on the fly ingame via the ReShade UI so that you can easily adjust the settings to your personal preferences.

What this preset does

This preset is equipped with AMD's Contrast Adaptive Sharpening filter that is particularly good to deal with TAA blur. I have optimized the filter to only be applied in a circular region around the image center (a "fixed foveated" filter, if you will) where it actually matters - this way the performance impact is reduced as you don't pay for sharpening parts of the image where you can't tell the blur through the headset lenses, anyway.

Additionally, I have added basic color adjustment options for contrast, brightness and color saturation. These come at virtually no additional performance cost. In the default values of this preset, I've increased contrast and brightness very slightly and increased color saturation a little. It is just enough to remove the "grey mist" that seemed to be covering the image in my Valve Index on vanilla Skyrim. It is not any kind of reimagined Skyrim look. You can adjust these values to your personal liking or also reset them to their default unchanged values if you don't like it.

How to install

Just extract the contents of the 7z archive to your SkyrimVR installation directory. It includes the preset, the required shader and a custom VR-enabled Reshade build.

If you have previously used my Fallout 4 custom openvr_api.dll, please remove it and restore the original one. This ReShade preset makes it obsolete, and having both installed will probably cause conflict.

Adjusting values in-game