Shaders in P3DV5.4

[gray eagle]

I realize that all P3D versions have a shaders folder. I have been googling for info as to what the purpose of the shaders are and what they do.

I found the location of my V5 shaders folder and noticed that there is a ton of files there. I backed them up before archiving them. I then delete contents
of all the files in the shader folder and loaded P3DV5 and during the loading process noticed that P3D was rebuilding shader files. So the shader folder was
populated with a lot of files again. When I loaded a saved flight file,the aircraft and scenery looked slightly better then before. I have a Nvidia GEFORCE 3060
GPU with driver version 526.3 - I have not updated the driver as I figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I see there is a program out there called RD Shade and wonder if that would be of any benefit?

 

[Quantum_Amiga]

I realize that all P3D versions have a shaders folder. I have been googling for info as to what the purpose of the shaders are and what they do.

I found the location of my V5 shaders folder and noticed that there is a ton of files there. I backed them up before archiving them. I then delete contents
of all the files in the shader folder and loaded P3DV5 and during the loading process noticed that P3D was rebuilding shader files. So the shader folder was
populated with a lot of files again. When I loaded a saved flight file,the aircraft and scenery looked slightly better then before. I have a Nvidia GEFORCE 3060
GPU with driver version 526.3 - I have not updated the driver as I figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I see there is a program out there called RD Shade and wonder if that would be of any benefit?

<SNIP VID>

Hi Grey Eagle,

Yes there are 2 folders of shader files in P3D.
There is the compiled shaders folder which will typically hold a very large count of files, sometimes thousands and will be located in the appdata folder e.g. \AppData\Local\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5\Shaders

These compiled files will be prefixed by a version number relating to the version of P3D, will have a file extension of .cso and are generated on the fly as needed by P3D. These .cso files can be safely deleted as P3D will regenerate replacements according to the visual render requirements of the current flight.

And there is the actual shaders themselves being the files located in the \Prepar3D v5\ShadersHLSL folder.

These are the main shader files from where the compiled files are created, essentially they are text files describing how to render the look of P3D.

I've dabbled a bit with them myself to improve the look of P3D but for the non-technical crew a shader program is more the ideal as someone will have created the changes for you.


Which brings us to RDSHADE - I'd have to say to give it a miss as there appears no way to activate it and the author is not responding to emails at their stated email address, a bit of a sad state of affairs in reality.

A better program to manage your shaders is the suite by Toga Projects of France, they also do a textures package as well and it's quite inexpensive.

https://www.togaprojects.com/envplus
https://secure.simmarket.com/toga-projects.mhtml

Or if you like there is a set of freebees you can trial @ https://www.youtube.com/@VIRTUALROUTES (the New Volumetric clouds for P3D v5.4 vid has the details).

Shader mods can make all the difference to how P3D looks and is a completely reversible type of change.

And here is a pic of my own shader modded look.

Cheers