Nascar Racing 2003 - 20th Anniversary ReShade Preset

Personal project started at the end of 2020, ended these days, in conjunction with the 20th anniversary since the release of this amazing title.
My goal was to give a second life to Nascar Racing 2003 by Papyrous Group, the Nascar Racing simulator still considered by the community as one of the best racing simulators ever created. Physics and AI are still way superior to many modern simulators, and as offline hardcore Nascar simultator, it still has no rivals. Just in terms of graphics, obviously it feels the weight of the years - don't forget, it was developed in 2002!
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If you don't know what ReShade is, it is simply a real-time post process layer, which sits on top of the 3D output, similar to what Photoshop does with still pictures. But ReShade is even more more, it's capable of executing visual corrections also based on the ZBuffer - ie. adding AO, RayTracing, Global Illumination and more.
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About this project, I have been working on it in my spare time, for all those years, tweaking and improving almost every single parameter of each effect (so called Shaders) I used. Hundreds - or probably thousand - parameters tweaked and iterated, to finally get to an output which i believe it was unthinkable for a game released in 2003! With my ReSahde Preset, NR2003 is graphically on par - and in some circumstances even more advanced - than many videogames currently being released. Still, don't forget that the game comes with no lighting, basic blinn shaders, every asset has just a single texture (diffuse) rather than normal maps, PBR channels etc...
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Going more into some details, my job consisted in creating a layer stack of tweaks and graphic corrections, to bring to the game the following additions:
- Ambien Occlusion (developed by Pascal Gilcher)
- RayTracing (developed by Pascal Gilcher)
- LUT profile
- Super Sampling Antialiasing (developed by Pascal Gilcher)
- surface blur
- Chromatic Aberration
- Ambient Light/Hazeness
- tweaked color balance
- tweaked levels, curves, contrasts, saturation, lights, shadows, color temperature, gamma, exposure and more
- physical DOF (developed by Pascal Gilcher)
- camera vignette
- film grain
- created windshield scratches
- created masks to isolate Z-Depth related shaders, when in cockpit camera
YEPP!! The game uses two different Z-Depth Buffers for exterior and interior. When using the interior camera, both buffers are merged together by the engine, but ReShade is capable of using only one buffer at a time. This is an issue, for instance, with racetrack AO bleeding inside the cockpit, if not correclty masked to exclude it. Same happens with raytraced track objects, or windshield scratches.
Using masks to isolate some specific Z-Depth based effects, was actually the only workaround which popped up into my mind.
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Last but not least, my preset is capable of running (RayTracing included) at 60 fps on a 4th gen i7 + nVidia 1080Ti @ 2560x1440.
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Preset Download Link: https://skynetxp.gumroad.com/l/NR2003_20th_Anniversary
It's obviously for free!! Just type 0 in the price and download it.
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Some Credits:
- Nascar Racing 2003 by Papyrus Group
- ReShade by Crosire
- iMMERSE Shaders by Pascal Gilcher
- ReShade and NR2003 communities