Black Mesa Guide

NVIDIA SGSSAA (+ ReShade) & HBAO+ Guide for Black Mesa

NVIDIA SGSSAA (+ ReShade) & HBAO+ Guide

Overview

This will show you how to add decent anti-aliasing (SGSSAA) and ambient occlusion (HBAO+) to Black Mesa.

Important

WARNING: This will cut into your performance, so be warned! If you see your FPS go down from 200 to 100, don’t blame me.

I have a 100Hz, 3440x1440p monitor and performance is mostly fine.

My rig:
EVGA RTX2080Ti FTW3 overclocked
i7-8700K @ 5GHz
32GB DDR4 3600MHz

If your performance is unsatisfactory use SGSSAA 2x instead of 4x.

Download

Set up NVIDIA Inspector

  • Open NVIDIA Inspector
  • Select “Black Mesa” profile
  • Make it look like this:
  • Apply changes

Set up ReShade

ReShade installation:

  • Run ReShade installer
  • Click “Select game”
  • Browse …
  • Go to “…steamappscommonBlack Mesabin” and select captioncompiler.exe
  • Open
  • Select Direct3D 9 in ReShade installer
  • Deselect all, select LumaSharpen.fx (or select all if you want to mess around)
  • Done

ReShade configuration:

  • Start Black Mesa
  • On main menu, press [Home] or [Pos1]-key
  • Continue to the presets, select LumaSharpen
  • Set Sharpening Strength to 1.5
  • Enable Performance Mode at the bottom
  • Close ReShade UI with [Home], [Pos1] or [Esc]-key
  • Done

Ingame Settings

Turn off Anti-Aliasing and Motion Blur in Video settings.

Video Preview

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