Added RCAS (Robust Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) implementation to Shade.
The results are a little subtle, but quite nice overall. Does what’s advertised - makes the image sharper.
I recently saw mamoniem’s article https://mamoniem.com/behind-the-pretty-frames-pragmata/ Where he mentions use of CAS. I knew of CAS’s existence for a long time, but I always thought of it as a crutch to bad upscaling.
CAS - off
CAS - on
Looking at the pictures made me think otherwise. Pragmata (RE engine really) has a very competent frame stack, so the output image quality is great, yet CAS makes it look nicer. It’s not something that you can easily put a finger on. You could say “there’s more detail” or “The image is more sharp”, but that doesn’t feel adequate.
Anyway, I ported it over to WGSL and added it to Shade, here are results:
RCAS - on
RCAS - off
Thanks to Timothy Lottes for creating RCAS and to AMD releasing it to the public.