A Single VHS ReShade Preset Rewinds Cyberpunk 2077 to the 1980s

In Cyberpunk 2077, Night City’s towering holograms and rain-soaked streets already transport you to a neon-heavy future, but Redditor Tulired takes that environment and covers it in the grainy haze of a VHS cassette, thanks to one of their ReShade presets.

Spend few days learning about VHS and decided to make a Reshade Preset. Thoughts?

by u/Tulired
in LowSodiumCyberpunk

Gameplay footage shows you cruising past Arasaka towers that flash like bootleg tapes from a corner store’s back shelf. Colors spill just enough to soften the sharp edges of those cyber bits and chrome; it’s as if the sharpness has been muffled, like an old tape. Players who saw early versions say the impression lasts even on long walks around the sprawl, transforming every lane into a part from a lost ’80s newscast that you’d stumble into late at night.

Tulired spent several days investigating how VHS tapes used to look. Old home recordings and broadcast transmissions established patterns that were worth imitating. There’s ghosting, in which strong lights leave a faint echo on the screen, and chroma bleed, in which reds and blues smear right around the edges… all of which means that the colors are a little duller and worn than you’d expect. Then there are phosphor trails left over from fast motion, giving it the glowy appearance of a CRT television, and NTSC oddities, which add a touch of warp to the signal. There are also dust speckles all over the image, as if it has been played through a tape recorder several times, blurriness from low resolution, and a slight haloing around bright spots. To top it all off, there’s a ringing effect that tightens transitions, giving the impression that you’re watching an ancient analog feed.

One of these presets is based on vanilla Cyberpunk 2077, but only just; another is based on Dreampunk, a popular ReShade setup that just makes everything seem cooler and with better lighting. However, both of them continue to use path tracing to create realistic reflections on puddles and billboards. Tulired set the framerate at 30 FPS to simulate the jagged rhythm of a home camcorder, although 24 FPS appeared to be a problem on normal displays. However, the tests all performed at 1440p or 1080p on a high-end RTX 3080 Ti and Ryzen 7 5700X, and they remained stable even at full settings. Lower resolutions, such as 1183p or even 720p, simply make the image look more like an old VHS tape by compressing it even further.

To get it functioning, simply follow the regular ReShade installation steps. Download the framework from its official website, point it to Cyberpunk’s exe in the bin/x64 folder, and let it acquire all of the shaders it need. Drop Tulired’s preset files alongside the exe, play the game, then toggle it with the Home key to reveal a dropdown menu containing the ini file. Following the Reddit post, they ran a few early betas with a small group of testers before releasing a full vanilla version on Nexus Mods after the holidays. Since then, they’ve been modifying it based on feedback, adding more blur or crushing shadows deeper to achieve the perfect aged VHS tape effect.
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