Antialiasing in mupen64plus core?

RetroArch General
#1

Is there any way to get proper antialiasing in the mupen64plus core in 1.0.0.2? I’ve already tried:

Increasing the resolution in the core options and letting it downscale - Produces horrible uneven blurriness in text despite being in integer scales. Probably due to poor rendering, causing non-integer scaled text in higher resolutions, which is expected. every hle plugin i’ve ever seen has this problem when rendering in higher resolutions, regardless of what emulator i try.

Editing the configs in /system - RetroArch apparently doesn’t use the mupen64plus or video plugin configs there, as changing options does nothing.

I tried forcing it in video card’s settings, but that only AA’s the final output to the screen, which then becomes a blurry mess.

Force-feeding SMAA/FXAA through RadeonPro - No effects are applied. In fact, RetroArch ignores everything other than the OSD.

D3D driver/SweetFX is not an option on this PC, as d3d driver on its own crashes instantly on startup, even with a freshly downloaded copy of 1.0.0.2.

I also tried various antialiasing and softening shaders to no avail: advanced-aa looks like garbage fxaa just darkens the screen slightly and has no other effect. If I could get this shader to work properly, I’d go with it since its halfway decent at removing jaggies. various blur/softening shaders - most are horribly blurry, but this doesn’t really help with jaggies at all.

If it matters at all: I’m on Windows 8 (not 8.1, as its known to screw up other programs I use regularly), x64 GPU is AMD Radeon HD 7640G, CPU is AMD A8-4500M APU. Video drivers are the latest non-beta drivers available. I updated shaders folder to a fresh copy of the common-shaders repo. Also, I run RetroArch in native 320x240@120Hz (no doublescan) on an old crt monitor.

#2

I’m pretty sure this is why the shaders aren’t really doing much for you. You could try using maister’s NTSC shader, but that would probably be messier/blurrier than you’re shooting for.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much to be done at native res. N64 was simply a jaggy mess that relied on composite signal degradation to smear everything together.

#3

It’s also worth noting that like everything since that generation, the N64 is variable-resolution. While 320*240 is relatively common, it isn’t “native” any more than a billion other resolutions are. That could be contributing to your jaggy problem since there’s a high probability you’re running games at something other than their native res.

#4

I’m pretty sure this is why the shaders aren’t really doing much for you. You could try using maister’s NTSC shader, but that would probably be messier/blurrier than you’re shooting for.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much to be done at native res. N64 was simply a jaggy mess that relied on composite signal degradation to smear everything together.[/quote]

Actually the N64 did have a filter that smoothed the image and can look somewhat like AA. Only the most precise (super slow) software renderer plugins can duplicate it as far as i know…

The closest we can get at full speed in PC is using Anti-aliasing, but as Questwizard mentioned, we don’t have many options in RetroArch. I think advanced-aa looked pretty good but for some reason it only worked on the right half of the screen when I tried it in my PC :confused: