With the demise of GShade, I chose to use Nvidia's Freestyle over ReShade. I'm not sure how popular the application is since a lot of the documentation found with a quick Google search is 5 years old. Like this passage from the launch of the open beta in 2018.
Today, we’re unveiling NVIDIA Freestyle, a way for you to personally customize a game’s appearance through the application of real-time post-processing filters. With Freestyle’s options you can be more creative with your games, adding a retro war-themed filter for your favorite FPS, for example, or enhancing color and contrast to make a game look more photorealistic. Or maybe you’re color-blind, like me, and want to make a style that makes it easier to differentiate between colors and see key features.
After checking to make sure my computer could run GeForce Experience, I downloaded the application. I got to skip some steps because the application auto-detected Final Fantasy XIV.
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| The games GeForce Experience detected on my computer |
Nvidia Freestyle has three quick keys:
- Alt-F1 - Take a screenshot
- Alt-F2 - Screenshot settings
- Alt-F3 - Game filter
To set up, I first pulled up the game filter by pressing Alt-F3. I found 15 filters, each with sliders for various settings. The application allows for saving three sets of filters. I only saved one, which is down below.
Brightness/Contrast
- Exposure - 10
- Contrast - -14
- Highlights - 9
- Shadows - 21
- Gamma - 0
- Intensity - 30
- Texture Details - 55
Color
- Tint Color - 20
- Tint Intensity - 15
- Temperature - 0.5
- Vibrance - 20.6
I am sure some people will not like my settings, so use them as a starting point and adjust according to taste.
Unfortunately, to take a screenshot requires setting up the screenshot settings. The next thing I did after taking some fuzzy screenshots was press Alt-F2 and enter the settings into the screenshot filter. Just a warning, though. Freestyle only allows users to save one set of screenshot filters. Using the filters in FFXIV's Gpose feature is pretty much mandatory for anything fancy, although Freestyle does have those types of filters also.
I like the effect the application has during normal gameplay. However, I do have some things I find irritating. First, Freestyle requires running the game in full screen mode. No playing in windowed mode. Next, the slide-bars in the menu options are not fine and I could not find a method to enter numbers. The lack of fine tuning means my game filter and screenshot filter are slightly off. Finally, I could not take screenshots of the in-game menus, so I couldn't just take screenshots of my settings and post them in this article.
For my purposes, Nvidia Freestyle gets the job done. More artistic users or those with machines that don't meet the system requirements will want to move onto another solution. If anyone has a better solution that won't result in getting banned if used in a more modern online game, please let me know in the comments below.
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