RenoDX: 1,108 HDR Mods Built on ReShade

By Indie Kings | October 30, 2026

Updated October 30, 2026: clshortfuse/renodx, the Renovation Engine for DirectX Games, lists 1,108 game entries in its mod wiki, with 668 marked working and 402 marked in progress. The repository reports 4,630 stars, 202 forks and 37 contributors, is MIT licensed, was created on February 5, 2024, and its newest commit on October 29, 2026 reverts an OpenGL framebuffer read in the render target rewrite path.

Image: an HDR panorama of the amphitheatre in Pula, a demonstration of the range the mods try to recover, via Wikimedia Commons.

An add-on, not an executable patch

RenoDX is a toolset for modding DirectX games, and its name is short for Renovation Engine for DirectX Games. The README lists what it can do in one sentence: replace shaders, inject buffers, add overlays, upgrade swapchains, upgrade texture resources and write user settings to disk. The important architectural choice is how it gets inside a game. It does not patch version specific executable files. It loads as an add-on for ReShade, which already owns the hooks into Direct3D, and uses that existing injection layer to reach the render pipeline.

That choice buys compatibility and costs a dependency. Because ReShade handles the version specific hooking, a RenoDX mod can target a game without the maintainer reverse engineering every executable variant. The price is that users must install ReShade 6.8.0 or newer with full add-on support, copy a .addon64 or .addon32 file into the game folder, and open the ReShade menu with the Home key to configure it. No ReShade shaders are required, which is a useful clarification for people who associate ReShade with post process presets rather than add-ons.

The installation note for Xbox is a small window into how varied the targets are. The wiki tells users installing against an Xbox game to select gamelaunchhelper.exe rather than the game executable, because that is the process ReShade can attach to. On a normal storefront install, the installer usually finds the executable itself. The mod file then sits next to ReShade in the game directory, and the mod's own settings appear in the ReShade overlay.

Distribution is split between stability and freshness. Each mod has a snapshot build, often hosted through a contributor's GitHub Pages or release page, and many also have a Nexus Mods page. The wiki warns that snapshot builds may not be stable but are more up to date than their Nexus counterparts, and that specific installation instructions can live on the Nexus page rather than in the table. That is a realistic description of a community mod ecosystem: the canonical download is wherever the maintainer happens to publish, and the wiki is the index that ties it together.

What a mod actually changes

The wiki's mod table is the best measure of the project's scope. It contains 1,108 game entries, each with a maintainer, download links and a status. Of those, 668 are marked working and playable, 402 are marked in progress or lacking testing, and 38 carry another note. The list runs from 007 First Light and 1000xRESIST through Alien: Isolation, A Plague Tale, ARMORED CORE VI and Assassin's Creed, and it keeps going for hundreds of rows. A single repository is indexing mods for more games than most publishers ship in a decade.

The common thread is high dynamic range. RenoDX mods typically rewrite a game's shaders so that the rendering pipeline produces a proper HDR image instead of an SDR image that the display or the operating system stretches into HDR. That often means replacing the game's tonemapper, fixing color grading that was authored for SDR, and making sure the swapchain is configured for the wider format. The README's warning about washed out images is the practical version of this: if AutoHDR or RTX HDR is also active, the user gets double tonemapping and the result looks wrong, so those features should be disabled.

The mod table also shows how much of the work is per game rather than general. A mod for one title has to find that game's shaders, understand its render targets and decide which passes to replace. The universal pieces, the add-on loader, the buffer injection, the swapchain upgrade, are shared infrastructure, but the game specific shader work is not. That is why the project has 37 contributors and a wiki with a maintainer column. It is a platform plus a large collection of individually maintained ports, and the quality of any single entry depends on the person who wrote it.

The status column is the honest part. More than a third of the entries are in progress, which means a user browsing for a specific game should check the marker before installing. Some in progress mods work but lack testing, some have known breakage, and some are experiments. The legend distinguishes working and playable from in progress, lacking testing or potentially deal breaking issues. For a scene that often presents every release as finished, that distinction is worth more than the raw count.

There are also utilities beyond the game mods. A standalone FPS limiter add-on, a developer kit add-on, and decomp.exe, a Shader Model 6.0 and later decompiler, are published alongside the main project. The decompiler is the tool that makes shader work possible: you cannot rewrite a shader you cannot read, and the ability to recover something close to source from a compiled DXIL blob is the difference between guessing and editing. None of these are required to use a mod, but they explain how the mods get made.

The devkit and the MCP bridge

The most interesting recent addition is the live inspection workflow. The repository ships a devkit add-on that exposes frame, shader and resource inspection over a named pipe, plus a renodx-mcp-bridge process that turns that pipe into a Model Context Protocol server. An MCP client such as Codex can then list connections, connect to a running game, inspect resources and iterate on shader replacements without a human copying logs back and forth. The documentation walks through building the devkit and bridge with CMake presets and then connecting from the client.

That is an unusual amount of tooling for a mod project, and it points at where the work is going. Shader modding has always been a loop of dump, inspect, edit, rebuild and test, and most of that loop used to happen in separate tools. Putting inspection behind MCP lets an agent drive the repetitive parts while the human makes the judgment calls about what the image should look like. The bridge exposes tool groups rather than a single opaque command, which keeps the surface understandable and auditable.

The build matrix is equally serious. Continuous integration runs Clang, Ninja and Visual Studio x64 builds, and the repository includes CMake presets, clang-format and clang-tidy configuration, and a test directory. A mod that injects into arbitrary games has to be compiled carefully, because a crash in the add-on takes the game with it. The project's own metadata schema, a JSON file describing mod entries, suggests the wiki and the build are meant to stay in sync rather than drifting into a hand maintained list.

The caveats are the ones that come with any injector. ReShade add-ons hook deep into a game's rendering, so a mod can break with a game update, conflict with another overlay, or trigger anti-cheat in multiplayer titles. The project does not claim otherwise, and the per game status column is the best signal of whether a particular mod is ready. The latest commit, an OpenGL framebuffer read revert in the render target rewrite path, is a reminder that the infrastructure is still being adjusted at a low level, not just decorated with new game entries.

Project card

FAQ

What is RenoDX?
A toolset that loads as a ReShade add-on and replaces or upgrades parts of a game's rendering pipeline, most often to produce correct HDR output.

Is it a standalone program?
No. It requires ReShade 6.8.0 or newer with full add-on support, and the mod file is copied into the game folder next to ReShade.

How many games are supported?
The wiki lists 1,108 entries, with 668 marked working and 402 in progress or lacking testing. Support quality varies by mod.

Why does my image look washed out?
The wiki says to disable AutoHDR and RTX HDR, because running them alongside a RenoDX mod causes double tonemapping.

What is the MCP bridge for?
It exposes the devkit's frame, shader and resource inspection over the Model Context Protocol so an agent or external client can inspect a running game.

Is it safe for online games?
It injects into the render pipeline through ReShade. Check the specific game's mod status and its anti-cheat policy before using it in multiplayer.

Bottom Line

RenoDX is the most organized HDR modding effort in the DirectX scene, and the wiki is the proof: over a thousand game entries with maintainers and honest status markers, all built on shared add-on infrastructure rather than a thousand separate patches. The ReShade dependency keeps installation familiar, the devkit and MCP bridge show where shader modding is heading, and the decompiler utility explains how the work gets done. The trade is that quality is per game, more than a third of entries are unfinished, and snapshots can break. Pick a mod marked working, follow its Nexus or snapshot instructions, and turn off the operating system's HDR upscaling first.

Sources

• GitHub clshortfuse/renodx README, capabilities, ReShade requirement, utilities and contributing links, accessed October 30, 2026
• RenoDX wiki Mods page, installation steps, mod table, status counts and HDR warnings, accessed October 30, 2026
• RenoDX docs/DEVKIT_MCP.md, devkit add-on, MCP bridge and build presets, accessed October 30, 2026
• GitHub API metadata for clshortfuse/renodx, stars, forks, contributors, issues and latest commit, accessed October 30, 2026

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