Oi folks,
At last this major overhaul of UShader is done, and as you might already know it’s quite the upgrade over the previous versions both on a visual and technical level so let’s go through the key changes one by one.
The biggest change is without doubt the significant visual overhaul, which is pretty much in line with the major visual shifts my other packs have seen with their latest major updates. In this the case the visual overhaul has actually brought UShader a lot closer to the original SEUS v10.1 modification of mine that was trying to somewhat imitate but in a modern way. This starts with the much more vibrant skies that now feature deeper blues and sunsets with a very distinct and atmospheric purple tint as well as the overall improved clouds, which now also use temporal upscaling.
Speaking of temporal upscaling, TAAU is now also included and gives the pack a significant boost in visuals to performance-ratio which leads to it remaining as performant as before while looking a lot more refined and cohesive. Be aware that values other than 50% and 100% might cause issues with certain nVidia GPUs due to what can only be assumed to be driver weirdness… again.
The lighting has also seen a major upgrade through the addition of screen-space ray-traced ambient occlusion (RTAO), which also includes directional skylight and subtle bounced indirect lighting to give everything a more authentic and cohesive look.
Another highlight are the visuals in The End, which I have completely overhauled to give it a nice and unique visual appearance through volumetric and a skybox that features a black hole with faux-gravitational lensing.
Last but not least UShader is now internally rendering in the Rec2020 colour-space, which is one of the key reasons of the major improvements in colour rendering. In order to give those among you with wide gamut displays a way to properly leverage this I have added a setting that allows you to select the gamut of your display, allowing the tonemapper of the shaderpack to calculate its final result in the colour gamut of your display. This allows you to get a correct and not-oversaturated presentation of the game visuals while also leveraging the more vibrant colours of DCI-P3 for example if applicable.
Obviously there are a lot more additions than these few, but I though these were really worth highlighting but let’s jump into the full changelog without further ado. I hope you folks will enjoy this long overdue update :)
Changelog
- Overhauled general colour palette and visual style
- Overhauled skybox rendering
- Updated atmosphere simulation
- Adjusted various atmosphere parameters
- Updated skybox horizon rendering (similar to Kappa v5.0’s approach)
- Updated cloud lighting
- Overhauled cirrus clouds
- Adjusted volumetric clouds
- Added temporal upscaling for clouds (at 33% target resolution by default)
- Various internal skybox rendering and calculation improvements
- Overhauled water rendering
- Volumetric water is now disabled by default
- Vastly improved reflections and rough reflections support
- Improved rain wetness puddles
- No longer appear in dry biomes
- Switched to Rec2020 colour space for internal rendering
- Added screen-space ray-traced ambient occlusion (RTAO)
- Includes subtle bounced lighting from sunlight and emitters
- Includes directional skylight based on the current skybox (including clouds)
- Includes temporal accumulation and denoising
- Added temporal upscaling (TAAU)
- At 50% by default
- 25% and 75% may lead to visual issues with certain nVidia drivers and graphics cards
- Overhauled post-processing
- Updated tonemapper to accommodate for new visual style and wider colour space
- Vastly improved lens effects (bloom, depth of field, lens flares etc.)
- Overhauled dimension visuals
- The End now features completely new visuals
- Overhauled temporal anti-aliasing
- Exposed various new settings to accommodate for new and/or changed features
- Full internal overhaul, including various bug-fixes and performance optimisations
Downloads
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Curseforge and Modrinth allow me to gain some benefit through their respective rewards-programs, so you are encouraged to download from there unless they’re unreachable.
Make sure to visit my discord server for support, development progress and other information.
