Star Wars The Old Republic: Install ReShade to improve graphics

Star Wars The Old Republic is an excellent MMO, but it is starting to show its age. Improving its graphics can be easier on our eyes. The method I will explain below is free and works with 99% of games.

Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars The Old Republic requires a bit of tweaking for everything to work properly.

To avoid complicated steps, I will show you a simple file copy/paste method. I used the small software ReShade, which you can download for free here [ reshade.me ].

What is ReShade? Simply put, it’s a bit like Instagram filters. Imagine a photo of you just after waking up, transformed into a movie star image thanks to filters. ReShade does the same thing for games by applying filters called shaders — hence the name ReShade, reapplying shaders.

Here are four images to compare before and after (the images on the left are without ReShade):

Installing ReShade

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you already have everything you need and only need to use the Ansel filter customization button. More information here [ nvidia.com ].

Now, let’s move on to setting everything up:

Before starting, you will need to download this archive.

Ready-to-use ReShade installation option

1. Locate the game installation folder, more specifically the "game" folder, and go there. For example, mine is: D:\Origin\Star Wars-The Old Republic\swtor\retailclient
2. Extract the contents of the previously downloaded archive into the game folder
3. Open the file ReShade.ini with Notepad, for example, and replace ALL paths D:\Origin\Star Wars-The Old Republic\swtor\retailclient and ONLY that, even if there is something after it, with YOUR own path to the game folder, then save the file.
   • For example, if your path is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\Star Wars-The Old Republic\swtor\retailclient, paste this instead of D:\Origin\Star Wars-The Old Republic\swtor\retailclient
4. Launch the game and rediscover it 😊
5. To modify ReShade settings afterward, press SHIFT+F2 or the key combination you customized once in-game.

The workaround

When updating ReShade, you must absolutely choose DirectX 10 or 11 and modify the file ReShade.ini as follows:

Select this content:

[DX11_BUFFER_DETECTION]
DepthBufferClearingNumber=4294967295
DepthBufferMoreCopies=0
DepthBufferRetrievalMode=0
DepthBufferTextureFormat=0
ExtendedDepthBufferDetection=0
UseAspectRatioHeuristics=1

and replace it with this one:

[DX9_BUFFER_DETECTION]
AutoPreserve=1
BruteForceFix=0
DisableINTZ=1
FocusOnBestOriginalDepthstencilSource=0
PreserveDepthBuffer=0
PreserveDepthBufferIndex=4294967295
SourceEngineFix=0
UseAspectRatioHeuristics=1

If there is also a [DX9_BUFFER_DETECTION] section before modification, in addition to [DX11_BUFFER_DETECTION], you must replace both.