What's the difference between a Reshade and an ENB?

[☧ Voievod]

Wanting to install the SkyrimSE Re-Engaged ENB and besides the ENB there's also a Reshade file. Do I install them both?
Thanks

[Docsprock]

https://reshade.me/

http://enbdev.com/

[Ron]

Originally posted by ᛫ ᚠᚱᛖᛞᛖᚱᛁᚲ ᛫:

The thing with Reshade is that its doable in any game more or less. As the name suggest Reshade injects a layer over the game adjusting colours and lights. An ENB mod however replace game files replacing the core files with it's own effects. This is why I prefer Reshade, it won't touch the game files. And the good and bad is ENB is more demanding on your frames-per-second as it can pretty much display anything you tell it to, while Reshade is more limited but give better performance. A question of preference.

enb doesnt replace anything, you can delete the files and your saves will not even notice.

to OP: reshade is like retouching a photograph with, say, photoshop, while ENB is modfying the in-camera settings

as of right now, you are better off with a good reshade

[Big Boom Boom]

You think Reshade don't hit performance? Do you actually build your own Reshade or just copy pasta whatever people put on the website? ReShade can hit performance hard, and it can do many things.

As of right now ENB is updated enough to not hit performance too hard. Unless you have potato machine.

[Big Boom Boom]

Originally posted by ᛫ ᚠᚱᛖᛞᛖᚱᛁᚲ ᛫:

Originally posted by Big Boom Boom:

You think Reshade don't hit performance? Do you actually build your own Reshade or just copy pasta whatever people put on the website? ReShade can hit performance hard, and it can do many things.

As of right now ENB is updated enough to not hit performance too hard. Unless you have potato machine.

Not how Reshade is intended to work. It injects a limited layer of visuals to the game modifying colours and lights primarily. While if you got an ENB mod your imagination is the limit, or I should say your hardware. Been using Reshade and SweetFX for pretty much all of my games for as far as I can remember and not had any performance impact whatsoever. I recommend looking up compairson videos of Reshade and as you can see the difference is not that noticeable. While ENB can edit more or less everything like anti-aliasing, antiscopic filtering, bloom, colours, depth of field, lighting, motion blur, occlusion, reflections, shadows, the list goes on. ENB can turn a fourteen years old game into a graphics engine worthy of today, while Reshade is just a neat perfection as I like to call it to the original graphics engine. Reshade and SweetFX is a good complimentary mod to ENB though if you want that extra edge.

Dude, ever heard of ReShade Framework? Heck I can even make TES looks like Borderlands with ReShade. Only colours and lights? Pfft.

This is why I'm saying you only copy pasta people reshade preset. Stahp.

[󠀡󠀡]

Sweetfx is better direactx 11

[Randox]

I'm not sure why it's done (probably ease of design or performance), but a lot of ENB mods use both ENB and reShade, and you should install both to get the intended look.

To answer the question though, I believe that ReShade is purely a post process injector. It's purpose is to add shaders to the graphics pipeline to affect how a game looks. This can be to just change the colour balance of a game, or to add entirely new effects like SSAO (if the game doesn't have it already).

ENB on the other hand alters the render calls of the game directly. ReShade alters how a game looks, while ENB can alter how a game is rendered.

Basically, as I understand it, ReShade can only work with what the game natively puts out, graphics wise, where ENB has at least some ability to entirely replace certain effects with its own. I think ENB can be used to completely change the look of things like water or fire, depending on the game.

The one that really stands out to me is the ENB I used in GTA IV. Not only does it massively improve the look of the game, but it also increases the performance (substantially). I believe this is largely because it totally hijacks the awful water shader GTA IV uses and replaces it with something that wasn't designed to light computers on fire. It also replaces textures, because that's one of the things ENB can do. I also believe that ENB mods for both Bethesda and GTA games are aware of both the time and weather in game.

The advantage ReShade has is portability. For ENB to work properly, it has to be designed for the game. And it was. I think it was originally designed for Fallout 3 (one of the Bethesda titles anyway). ReShade can achieve most of the same results while playing a lot nicer with most games out of the box.