The fan-favorite add-on for Final Fantasy XIV called GShade has recently landed itself in some hot water causing many users to want to uninstall it. The developer of the program had slipped in a bit of malicious code that would cause a user’s PC to reboot if a specific action was performed and this has driven away a lot of the community support the program had. However, many users are scared that they might not fully uninstall Gshade and leave the malware behind. Let’s go over how to fully uninstall all of GShade and keep your Final Fantasy XIV files intact.
How To Back Up Your Shader Settings for Final Fantasy XIV
Before you remove all of the GShade files, you might want to pull your settings out of the program so you are able to bring them over to another shader program like REshade. Pulling these files out is fine and safe. Doing this will save you a lot of time when you switch to another program since you can just drop them in and all of your settings will be the same as they were with GShade.
To find the files you will want to navigate to your Gshade install folder. By default, this will be under C:\Program Files\GShade\gshade-shaders, you will want to make a copy of this folder somewhere else on your computer. You will also want to navigate to your Final Fantasy XIV install folder and save the shader settings there. The default location for these files is C:\Program Files (X86)\SquareEnix\Final Fantasy XIV – A Realm Reborn\game or at C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Final Fantasy XIV Online\game if you have the game through Steam.
Again, it is safe to save these files but if you don’t care about bringing your settings over to a new program you can just skip this step.
How to Remove GShade Fully From Your Computer and Final Fantasy XIV
Once you have backed up all of your files. You can run the GShade uninstaller in the GShade folder at C:\Program Files\GShade by default. You do not want to check the “Backup Installations and Settings” since you have already done this and this is related to GShade which you probably won’t be coming back to.
The uninstaller will also ask you to restart your computer once you have finished running it, you don’t need to do this right now as there are still files you need to remove from your computer fully remove GShade. But it is nice that the program asks you this time before turning off your computer.
Once the uninstaller is done, you will want to go to your public folder under C:\Users\Public and see if you can find any more files with GShade in the name. You can delete any that you find in there as they all should be gone at this point.
The last step is removing the actual application file from Final Fantasy XIV itself. You will want to go back to your Final Fantasy XIV install folder and go inside the game folder. Look around for a file called dxgi.dll and remove it, you should also remove a file called d3d11.dll if you see that in there as well.
Now you just need to restart your computer and all of the GShade files should be safely removed. Now you can go get another shader program if you want and start working on setting it up. That way your screenshots will always look their best. If you are running into any screenshot errors, we should be able to help you fix those as well.
Final Fantasy XIV is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
