Black Desert Online - HDR Mod

[SGTForgery]

RenoDX Addon by Forge

!!! Addon only works with Remastered / Ultra quality settings !!!

Gallery

RenoDX HDR

Vanilla SDR

RenoDX HDR

Vanilla SDR

Breakdown

BDO utilises Pearl Abyss proprietary engine that since the launch of Remastered edition has garnered a lot of flak for the visual presentation. Here's the breakdown of their post processing....

• Custom S shaped tone curve with a bizarre choice of settings (doesnt mimic any tonemap operator)
• That then uses heavy contrast LUTs with elevated saturation
• Extreme exposure (30x) going into the S shaped tone curve blowing out scene highlights even further on SDR
• Aggressive eye adaption shader as a band aid fix to try and fix blown out highlights from the above processing that instead also results in crushing black floor
• Forced sharpening
• Overly stylised bloom + convolution bloom style / lens flare kernel textures which the user has no settings control over (there's +30 separate shaders + textures that build up their bloom)
• Nearly all their post processing also utilises Per Channel which contributes to poor colour representation

The end result of all the above is that the visual presentation suffers...

• Highlight, even mid range details are blown out and extremely clipped
• Black floor is almost always crushed, destroying shadow detail
• Underexposed due to the aggressive eye adaption shader failing to properly raise brightness in many interiors
• Overexposed due to the aforementioned 30x exposure increase + eye adaption shader

TLDR is the game presents itself as being 'Deepfried'. Post processing is visually poor and the only thing missing to complete the visual sins would be excessive chromatic aberration dabbed on top...

I saw some online discussion surrounding the game's 'issues' being caused due to bad 'HDR rendering'. That is not the case. Having seen the shader code now, the entire blame is solely to be placed on the post processing / grading that Pearl Abyss created. The game handles HDR rendering fairly well with RTVs and texture resources (as far as most games go). I also found multiple HDR output related shaders from the game, however they do no appear to be used by the game at all. Perhaps Pearl had plans for HDR output? Can't say for certain.

Addon is not a 1:1 match with SDR (compared to almost all other RenoDX mods) due to all the above. I rebuilt post processing in favour for setting up a better visual 'base' which allows HDR output more breathing space and the ability to shine in BDO.

Addon Features

• Fixes vanilla post processing visual issues
• Utilises scRGB which helps to solve the majority of visual banding
• Utilises Hermite Spline for HDR tonemapping
• Removed forced sharpening in favour of user controllable RCAS (ty Lilium for perms)
• Vignette strength slider
• Bloom strength slider
• UI toggle
• Controls for world map brightness
• Shortfuse film grain
• Added 'HDR Look button'

Installation

1. Download the latest Reshade version with Addon support
2. Run Reshade.exe, select BlackDesert64.exe (which you will find under \Black Desert Online\bin64), select DX11. No other reshade shaders or addons are required, you can skip all of them
3. Download BDO RenoDX addon and add it to the same bin64 folder as BlackDesert64.exe (\Black Desert Online\bin64)
4. On game launch, you should now see Reshade menu on the top as well as a RenoDX tab appear
5. To improve performance, disable the generic reshade addons under Addons in Reshade menu that are on by default (Generic Depth and Effect Runtime Sync) then reset the game to take effect.

Latest build under Snapshot or Pins over on the RenoDX server below (for questions and support Discord will be the best place)

Compatibility

• Please ensure RTX HDR is disabled, AutoHDR will auto disable itself since Windows will recognise a HDR swapchain e.g scRGB in this case
• This will be incompatible with most ReShade presets. Almost all ReShade effects are made for SDR. (This also applies to NV overlay based filters)