Depth3D: ReShade shaders that turn a flat game into a stereoscopic one

What the shader actually does, and how it differs from driver-level 3D

Depth3D is a set of post-process shaders for ReShade, and the headline shader is SuperDepth3D. The description of what it does is the clearest statement of the approach: it allows for depth map-based 3D, similar to what NVIDIA offers with Compatibility Mode 3D and what TriDef does with Power 3D, and SuperDepth3D provides much more control and support for different devices.

That last clause is the whole proposition. A driver-level 3D mode treats the frame as a flat image and offsets it by a fixed amount per eye, which is why it looks wrong at varying distances. A depth-based shader reads the depth buffer, so it knows how far away each pixel is and can offset each pixel by an amount proportional to that distance. Objects in the foreground separate, the background recedes, and the effect holds together as the camera moves.

The cost is that you now own the depth buffer problem, and the project has built a lot of machinery around that.

The output format list is long and shows how much design work went in. Side by Side, Top and Bottom, Line Interlaced, Column Interlaced, Checkerboard, Quad Lightfield, Anaglyph, TriOviz Inficolor emulation, and 2D plus Depth. There is a Virtual Reality mode for OpenXR headsets and a Theater mode for phone VR and AR glasses.

Two things stand out in that list. Anaglyph is the red and cyan glasses format, which is old and mostly a curiosity now, and its presence suggests the project is aiming at completeness rather than at one target. And 2D plus Depth is the format used by most modern VR runtimes, where the headset does the stereoscopic compositing itself and the shader only has to supply a depth channel, which is why it sits in a list otherwise made of formats the shader has to composite by itself.

The main shader's options are documented in full on a separate Shader Adjustments page, and the wiki is the reference rather than the README, which is the normal arrangement for a project with this many knobs.

Overwatch and the profile list, which is the real time saver

Overwatch is the companion tool, and it is what turns this from a shader you tune by hand into something you install and play.

The description is precise about what it does. Overwatch is a companion tool designed to enhance your experience with SuperDepth3D by automatically setting depth and 3D configurations in many games. It simplifies setup so you can spend less time tweaking and more time enjoying immersive gameplay.

The number is the headline. It now carries profiles for well over nine hundred titles, plus emulator profiles for PCSX2, CEMU, Yuzu, Ryujinx, Project64, Xenia and N64 Recompiled.

Nine hundred titles is a substantial body of per-game knowledge. Every one of those profiles encodes a set of decisions that would otherwise take you an evening per game: where the depth buffer is, whether the game has a separate weapon-hand depth, where the cut-off point is, and whether the convergence value is right for that particular camera. When a profile loads, the shader says so at the top of its menu and sets depth, convergence, boundary detection and weapon-hand handling for you. The instruction is blunt about what you should not do afterwards: leave the ZPD and Depth Map options alone and just play.

The emulator profiles are the part that surprised me, and they explain a design decision. A single SuperDepth3D build has to work on a discrete GPU and on integrated graphics, and the differences go beyond performance. The support for different devices phrase in the description is doing real work here, because a headset attached to a laptop is a different rendering path from a desktop with a dedicated card.

Profiles are welcome, and the mechanism for contributing one is specific: turn on Profiler_Mode in the shader and send them to the author. So the profile list is built by playing each game and exporting the configuration, not by guessing.

Enhanced Generic Depth, and the games that will not give you a clean depth buffer

The Generic Depth Mod, or GDM, is the most interesting technical component, because it addresses a problem that is not really about 3D at all.

Enhanced automatic depth buffer detection, built on ReShade's own depth detection add-on. The problem it solves is described concretely. Some engines do not hand ReShade a clean depth buffer. Unreal pads the depth allocation and renders the scene into a sub-rect of it, and upscalers like DLSS, FSR and XeSS move that sub-rect around every time you change a quality setting.

That is a nasty failure mode, because it means the depth data is technically present but offset by an amount that depends on settings the player changes. Without help, SuperDepth3D has to work out where the picture actually is by looking at it, which is a per-frame image analysis problem.

GDM tells it exactly, every frame. The difference is between reconstructing geometry from the image and being told the answer, and it is the difference between a shader that works and one that mostly works.

There is a second feature, and it is a quality of life improvement for first-person games. It can also supply a separate weapon-hand depth buffer, which removes the per-game CutOff Point tuning that first-person games normally need. The weapon-hand problem is that in a first-person game the weapon is rendered at a different depth than the world, often in a separate pass, and the naive 3D separation treats the gun as part of the scene, so the gun floats or clips. Supplying a separate buffer for it means the gun can be handled independently.

Two preprocessor switches in the shader control it: GDM_DEPTH_AUTOFIT, which is on by default and harmless without the add-on, and GDM_WEAPON_DEPTH.

There is one distribution wrinkle. GDM is not on a public download page. You get it from the Discord, or deploy it from the Depth3D card in GPU Selector, which also turns off ReShade's built-in Generic Depth for you. It requires ReShade with add-on support.

GPU Selector and Inject Mode, where the hard games are handled

GPU Selector is a separate program, and it solves the problem that stops most injectors from working on modern PC games.

The description is precise: GPU Selector sets up ReShade, Depth3D and the Depth3D add-ons for you through its Inject Mode, for each launch, and removes them when the game closes. You do not run the ReShade setup wizard at all.

So Inject Mode is a temporary, per-launch deployment. Nothing is permanently written into the game folder, which means nothing is left behind to be detected, and the setup is repeated every time you launch.

The steps are short. In the Mods tab, set the ReShade card's Build Type to Full Add-on Support and click Download ReShade. Turn on Inject Mode, the syringe button on the ReShade card. Click Deploy on the Depth3D card. Then start the game with Launch in GPU Selector and press Home. Overwatch.fxh comes with it, so games with a profile are already configured.

The set of games this covers is where it becomes interesting. Its Inject Mode is a real alternative where a normal ReShade install cannot work at all: UWP and Microsoft Store games, titles with file integrity checks, EAC-protected games, and Wine and Linux.

Those are four genuinely different obstacles. A Store game is sandboxed and its files are not yours to modify. A file integrity check compares the executable against a known hash. Anti-cheat is a deliberately hostile environment. And Wine on Linux presents a filesystem layout that a Windows-shaped installer gets wrong.

There is also a detail in the guide that solves a common conflict. The Enhanced Generic Depth add-on is added to every Inject Mode launch and ReShade's built-in Generic Depth is switched off for that launch, so the two never fight over the depth buffer. A ReShade installed into a game folder with the setup wizard is separate and does not get that treatment, so for those games the answer is to pick Take Over This Launch when GPU Selector asks.

The last capability is one nobody expects from a graphics tool. It can also force a game onto a specific GPU, which on hybrid laptops and dual-GPU desktops is often what makes the depth buffer show up in the first place.

The licensing, and why the source is closed

The licensing section is short and it is the most important section for anyone outside personal use.

For hardware makers: Depth3D is free for personal use, but it is not open source and it is not free to ship inside a product. If you build a display, glasses, a handheld or a headset and want Depth3D on it, contact the author directly. There is no reseller or agency for this.

So the terms are: free for individuals, proprietary, and licensed separately for hardware. The licensing page is linked, and the reason for a closed source here is not stated in the guide, but the structure of the offer suggests the answer. A consumer shader for a free enthusiast hobby, and a commercial relationship for anyone embedding it in a device.

The repository itself carries no recorded licence, which is consistent with a closed source project that keeps its source in the repository but does not grant redistribution rights. The top level of the repository is Shaders/, Other Shaders/, Textures/, docs/ and a .github/ directory, so the shaders are the product and the rest is supporting files.

The author also says he is open to receiving hardware to work against, with the reasoning that getting 3D right on a device is far easier with the device in hand. That is a genuine engineering constraint of this kind of shader. A depth-based 3D effect has to be tuned for a specific display, a specific lens geometry and a specific IPD, and the tuning cannot be derived from a specification alone.

The practical implication for a player is that this is a tool you install and configure, not one you read. And for a hardware maker, it is a conversation to start, with no reseller in between.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Depth3D if you play modern PC games on a headset or a 3D display and want per-game stereoscopic output that you can tune, since the depth-based approach gives you far more control than the fixed 3D modes built into graphics drivers. Do not adopt it if you need to ship it in a product, because the project is free for personal use and explicitly not open source and not free to ship inside a product. Before you set it up, check whether your game appears in the compatibility list, and expect to do the depth detection tuning yourself for titles with no Overwatch profile.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README