Versions of ReShade from 3.1.1 onwards have reversed the depth buffer by default.
The depth buffer is responsible for all the depth-based effects you might use, like dof, adaptive fog, mxao, etc.
If you are installing ReShade 3.1.1+ from scratch without any old settings carrying over you will likely find none of these depth-based effects look as you expect. For example, with dof the foreground will be blurred and the background will be clear.
Thankfully there’s a really easy way to change it back to how it needs to be for TS4 (and any other game that doesn’t have a reversed depth buffer).
Here is an album of pictures with step-by-step instructions.
For those who don’t need the pictures (it is a simple fix after all):
Open the ReShade gui (usually shift+f2)
Navigate to the ‘Settings’ tab
In the ‘Preprocessor Definitions’ box find the line: RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED
If it is set to 1 it means the depth buffer is reversed. Change the 1 to 0
Navigate back to the ‘Home’ tab
Click ‘Reload’ at the bottom and wait for the shaders to recompile
And that’s it! Now your depth-based effects should be working as intended.
Note 1: If you’re not experiencing any problems with the depth buffer you don’t need to do this. When I upgraded to 3.1.1 I didn’t need to, because my settings carried over from my previous ini files. You’ll probably only need to do this if you’re installing everything from a clean Bin folder, with no old ReShade ini files present.
Note 2: With each new ReShade installation, when you download the shaders from the github repository there’s a chance some of them will be different from how they were when you or other preset creators made the presets you use. If something looks odd you may have to reconfigure the shader settings in the Home tab yourself to get them how you want. I just had to do this with the new mxao shader. Additionally, sometimes creators will give you modified versions of shaders with a preset, and downloading from the github repository will overwrite those modifications. Always keep backups of the files you download in case you need to swap them back in.
Note 3: Don’t forget, for depth-based effects to work you must have Edge Smoothing turned off in the game settings. You do not need to turn off post-processing as well, but it is recommended to edit your graphicsrules.sgr file (found in your Bin folder) to change the ssao entries from ‘true’ to ‘false’ to avoid conflicts with the mxao shader and any other little quirks. (Turning off ssao in graphicsrules.sgr gets rid of the game’s own ambient occlusion (which is what you add back in with mxao), and also the game’s own dof (distance blur), so you don’t need to use a mod to remove blur at the same time.)
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