Is GShade allowed?

[Packetdancer]

Even the old post wasn't accurate in relation to Gshade though. It was about a specific ENB injector tool. What they say about that does not equate to a different tool or program, even if they function similarly. So realistically, you're still in the same position as you were before lol.

While it wasn't about GShade -- which I'm not sure actually existed in 2013; I'm pretty sure Marot forked ReShade after that point -- the 2013 thread was asking about shader injection in general. There is another later thread referencing that one which does confirm that would cover ENB, ReShade, GShade, etc.

(Sadly, this forum's search tool is terrible, so I can't find the second one to link it.)

None of which is super relevant, because it's been nine years since the original thread. And like... 7? ...since the one that referenced it and elaborated on it. The TOS has demonstrably changed multiple times since then, so we can't really rely on that thread being a current answer any longer.

Obviously, as someone who contributes to GShade and uses it extensively for artistic work, I would prefer that it could be taken as an authoritative and still-applicable answer. I like being able to turn the game into a pencil sketch, or an oil painting, or a flat-shaded cartoon, or slice it apart into layers to do complex operations and overlays/underlays, etc.

I just know that realistically, we cannot treat that thread as still being current/valid information, as it's very old.

And what of Nvidia Freestyle? XIV is on approved, official list of games supported. A company as big as nvidia wont just randomly add games to that list without approval, surely. SE has therefore approved XIV - they must've. But if we take what its said by random GM or parts of TOS, its not allowed despite being approved by SE??

Again, while Freestyle is very similar to ReShade/GShade from the end-user viewpoint -- and you can even add your own custom shaders to it, albeit with some effort -- under the hood it functions in an extremely different manner.

ReShade/GShade rely on injecting their code into the host program by hijacking DirectX; as a result, they do modify the actual game process. GShade doesn't run as a separate program, in other words; GShade is contained in a DLL which FFXIV is tricked into loading instead of DirectX, and from a technical standpoint all of GShade's code thus executes as though it were part of the FFXIV client code.

Freestyle does all of the shader modifications down at the Nvidia driver level; it never interacts with the FFXIV client in any way. From the game's point of view, it's basically the same as monitor color calibration -- something that affects the final graphics output between game and screen, but which happens at an operating system level and which the game has no direct interaction with. (The hotkeys to enable/disable Freestyle are not handled by the game being post-processed, either; they're handled by GeForce Experience, which is why Freestyle does not work when GeForce Experience isn't running.)

This is not something GShade et al can do. As they do not, y'know, control the Windows graphics drivers, as Nvidia does.

To put it another way: GShade et al are shader injection, because they inject the code that actually executes the shader post-processing logic into a host process. Freestyle is merely shader-based post-processing, minus the injection. And the injection is the real problem, as that's the portion which directly interacts with the FFXIV client (and modifies the program's execution once it's running).

So even if they wanted to strictly enforce the letter of the law, Freestyle would still almost certainly remain fine to use; from FFXIV's viewpoint it's basically akin to changing your Windows display settings.

(I believe the same is true of AMD Adrenaline -- that the processing happens at the driver level -- but I haven't ever played with it to confirm that.)