Hey there! I just had a quick reshade question. Sorry for being so abrupt, but I was pointed in your direction. I know in order to get DOF to work in reshade when it comes to TS$, you need to turn edge smoothing off. But doing that makes all the presets that don’t use DOF look a lot worse, despite having everything set to ultra graphics. My question: is there some way to deal with that?? Would switching to high quality textures fix the issue? Thank you so much for your time!
Edge smoothing is anti-aliasing, so if you turn it off you need to use another type one way or another to compensate. ReShade comes with two types of anti-aliasing: SMAA and FXAA. I find SMAA to be a lot better, so that’s what I use. My settings are as follows:
threshold = 0.02
search steps = 112
search steps diagonal = 20
corner rounding = 0
There will still be some edges that are a bit jaggy from time to time, but they shouldn’t be particularly noticeable.
If you want to go the extra mile to get the most anti-aliasing you can, you can try downsampling or hotsampling.
Downsampling means running the game at a larger resolution than your native monitor resolution and shrinking it back down so it fits on your monitor. If you have an nvidia card you can do this quickly and easily in the nvidia control panel by setting up DSR resolutions, and then choosing one of them in the game. Be aware though you do require a good PC to be able to play downsampled because it’s rendering many times more pixels than it ordinarily would and that takes resources. All those extra pixels do, however, mean superior anti-aliasing.
Hotsampling is similar to downsampling, but just for screenshots rather than for gameplay. This is what I do for my screenshots. I use a program called SRWE that lets me change the size and shape of the game window whenever I want. It means I can play the game at its regular size, and when I have set up a screenshot I can change the window size to much larger, take the shot, then change it back to normal again. While you still need to have a half-decent PC to do this, it’s much more forgiving than playing the game downsampled, because you’re only increasing the resolution for short periods when it doesn’t matter if everything grinds to a halt. I wrote a tutorial on using SRWE here (it uses Mass Effect: Andromeda as its example, but the same steps all apply to TS4).
Using HQ textures will have no effect on anti-aliasing, but of course will likely improve the image quality in other ways so that’s entirely up to you whether you use them or not. I don’t, and I’m quite happy with the quality of my game, but I use maxis match content, where HQ textures aren’t as noticeable anyway. Either way, as I say, it doesn’t impact aliasing at all.