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I get a lot of requests for what shader I use in ATS so I thought I ought to put it up somewhere and share with you how my game ended up looking better and performing better than every other Reshade preset I have tried. A bit of background, I have spent a LOT of time the past year tinkering trying to squeeze every last drop out of ATS graphics. Man it has been a journey to say the least. I have been through a lot of graphic and weather mods, different setups and tried post-processing tools like Reshade with presets from here on the forums or other places on the internet, made my own, all to try to find that one visual setup that is superior and makes ATS shine. A lot of the Reshades I tried made the game look too processed and not natural.
So, after a lot of research, trial and error, comparing the game to real life pictures and adding just the right amount of cinematic feel to it, I have honed in on a setup that I feel has the most true-to-life lighting, attention to detail and overall color and contrast balance. The best part of it is that you do not even have to use Reshade. In my humble opinion, the results you can get with NVIDIAs own Freestyle Overlay filter are superior in terms of picture and shader quality and performance / framerate to what you get out of Reshade. Without stating the obvious, this only works if you have a NVIDIA card and the overlay enabled in NVIDIA Geforce Experience. Also any Reshade should obviously be turned off or uninstalled to not interfere with the filter.
IN-GAME SETTINGS
Before we get into the NVIDIA Overlay menu, we need to venture into the base settings menu of ATS to set up the groundwork. Vanilla ATS has quite the unrealistic lighting, bloom and color balance. Part of it is due to 1. SCS not prioritizing graphics for high end PC players and 2. the built in image settings that they offer actually distort the color balance and lighting. Putting a filter on top of those settings is kind of like putting lipstick on a pig (no offense SCS) and you'll end up not being able to understand why the game looks like it does no matter how good your Reshade or filter may be.
The biggest culprits are two settings: HDR and Color Correction. These must be turned OFF to proceed. In general, we aim to turn off as many image processing settings that are incorporated into ATS as possible, because we want to take over the control of the image ourselves, with the filter. Now hang on, you might say, those make my game look awesome! Yes, at this point, you might think so, because HDR makes everything brighter and color correction saturates the image nicely from a vanilla perspective. But at the end of this you will see that both of them are better left off and better controlled through the post processing filter as it is more powerful and in terms of colors more accurate. We must start with as clean an image as possible if we are going to achieve the best result with the filter we apply.
Next turn off bloom using the console. Type "g_bloom 0". Keep the brightness slider where I have mine, but you may have to adjust depending on your monitor.
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As far as the rest of the settings, provided you have the GPU and CPU, go as high as it allows you to play at a solid framerate is my advice. I keep the AA turned off, SSAO at LOW and scaling at 300% and I have a 2080 Super @1440p and I usually stay around 60 fps with occasional drops when raining and too heavy traffic. If you can go higher without framerate issues, go ahead. I have not seen many GPUs being able to handle the poor implementation of AA in ATS. SSAO looks gorgeous on higher settings but it does stutter, and a lot of the visual aspect of SSAO will be mitigated with this filter. For the rest of the settings not pictured, max them all but remember to keep mirror settings on medium unless you are running an absolute beast of a GPU. V-sync off (it should be on in NVIDIA settings). Also, I would assume since you are reading a guide for a filter to produce high-end results, that you have already maxed your GPU settings in your NVIDIA control panel options menu (AA etc). If not, go ahead and do so now.
NVIDIA OVERLAY
BELOW ARE SETTINGS FOR 1.39 ONLY! SCROLL DOWN PAST INSTRUCTION FOR UPDATED 1.40 SETTINGS.
Next, lets look at the actual Nvidia overlay settings. The overlay is enabled by pressing Alt+Z keys provided its activated in the Geforce Experience menu. In the pictures below, I use slot 3 for the filter. You may use whatever slot you like.
The filter is comprised of three effects, Details, Brightness / Contrast and Color. Details will sharpen your image and replace the HDR setting you turned off in game, see values below. It will also add a slight bloom to compensate for the in game bloom feature that is off. Brightness / Contrast will add just that so follow the values in the pictures below. Shadows in that setting will give you an illusion of a high SSAO setting without actually the need to run a high SSAO setting beyond low which would likely introduce lag. Last but not least, we fix the unrealistic color palette of ATS with Color. What is missing is a proper injection of blue to balance the RGB spectrum. We also lower the saturation and add a tiny, barely visible blue filter. Values also seen below.
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(Note about sharpness: Sharpness can be set between 5-10 depending on your preference. I find 5 to be a good balanced image but if you like a little sharper you can put it at 8 or even 10. Anything above 10 will create artifacts and you'll end up distorting the image.)
And that's it! If you have followed the guide this far, entered all the values into your filter, you should be pretty much set up. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. Happy realistic trucking with NVIDIA Overlay!
DISCLAIMER: This shader is best used with Project Next Gen 1.8 version (ETS2 Weather file) and has been adapted for this mod. It is what is being used in the pictures below and I strongly advise you to use either that or the newest Project Next Gen for ETS2 (weather file still works for ATS). You may not like the results on other weather mods. Oh and lastly, this is not a Reshade hate post
I love Reshade and use it in many other games, I just prefer the performance of NVIDIA Overlay, we'll see, perhaps you will too after trying this 
1.40 / 1.41 release note: See settings below. Adjust brightness accordingly.
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Also, since 1.40 I am using Pivas prolonged weather mod: viewtopic.php?f=202&t=297862&p=1525670#p1523605
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1.40 / 1.41 previews:
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