How to Use ReShade to Make iRacing Look Better

A few months ago, Dan Suzuki showed us how to use Reshade, a tool to modify shaders, or basically how change the light and shadows in games. This combined with a few other options allows you to totally change the colors and lighting in games, and best of all, we can use it with VR with a few minor adjustments.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t come without a performance cost, although if you’re going spare with your current setup it can be much smaller than if you’re already at the limits, where that small cost can be more noticeable.

How to install Reshade?

The installation of the program is done through the executable that can be found on its website, by clicking on the following link: ReShade_Setup_4.9.1.exe

In the installation simply hit the button to apply to DirectX11 and find the iRacing executable in the Program Files folder in C: and accept the defaults or uncheck everything, so we will be left with the basics. If you go with screens you don’t have to do anything else to see its effects (it is possible that the first start of iRacing has to be as administrator) and play from there. With HP Reverb G2 or virtual reality glasses we needed to add an OpenVR preset made for Valve Index that works on the other HMDs. It is available for download by clicking here: ReshadeVR_sharpen_color.zip

In theory we can start a test session and see in the upper left corner if the Reshade is loading together with iRacing. Once we are with everything loaded, we can activate it (or deactivate it) to see its effect by pressing the End key. To get the options on screen and modify it we just have to press the Start key (the one just above End, not the Windows key).

DISABLED:

ENABLED:

Once we receive this first impression we will notice more vivid colors and how the image we receive by default from iRacing is somewhat dull and washed out. It is also true that such an image helps our eyes in longer sessions, so it is a matter of setting new values, or deciding whether to stick with the Reshade installation.

There’s one last issue, and that is that it doesn’t work when connecting to iRacing servers without changing the value

connect_sockets = 1;

in the My Documents file iRacing/core.ini.

To uninstall you only have to run the exe again and look for the iRacing executable. It will tell you that a profile already exists and that if you want to uninstall it.

See you on the track!