Hi Cyber, thank you for your legendary preset work.
I have read the first post in its entirety, and I have read many posts of this thread plus your readme files. I have been exploring and tinkering in my spare time across multiple computers and TVs for over a year, and I have never succeeded at getting a result that isn’t either extremely dark or burning your eyes out with hot spots.
I am now trying to shoot for what I think is the bare minimum of keeping HDR off on Windows and RetroArch, and using the simplest pack: CyberLab CRT-Royale Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack
I am happy with all HDR off and these shaders at their default settings except for one issue which is that the contrast is crazy and I cannot figure out how to fix it. The contrast makes colors look far too intense, and it causes eye strain strongly enough that I cannot just deal with it.
I am attaching a screenshot of what colors are supposed to look like on the left, and of what colors look like with the shader on the right. The difference is very clear in the color of the character’s skin and the background gradient.
Hmmm…let me see how I can address your concerns. Firstly, a “raw” screenshot of an emulator output is not what I would call “correct” or use as any source of reference in this context. My reference point is how the image would look on a 15kHz CRT TV because that’s what I played these old games on when I was growing up.
It can’t possibly look the same after it passes through the video encoding, filtering and processing circuitry of a console’s video output and it certainly won’t look the same as your “raw” image after that signal is processed and decoded in the CRT TV or monitor then converted to electrons and blasted onto the phosphors of individual red, green and blue colours, separated by some sort of mask which are all quite a lot larger than the pixels which make up that upscaled screenshot you’re comparing things to.
How could that be “correct” when the ears and text look so extremely jagged and in contrast, the image from the CRT shader appears a lot smoother in the outlines?
It would help quite a bit if you listed the model and/or specs of the displays you’re having trouble getting an acceptable image out of as that’s the most important part of the equation and it’s a part that a GPU screenshot cannot convey.
So you’re basically sharing the viewfinder film or slide without the light projecting or shining through it.
If things are too “hot” perhaps your HDR Brightness or Gamma are set too high for your display and you’re seeing clipping in the whites/highlights.
If you’re experiencing the same in the colours then perhaps things are oversaturated. You can lower the Saturation if that is the case.
For the vast majority of my presets, a bright display capable of at least 600nits Peak Brightness is the absolute minimum recommended.
I do have some 4K HDR Ready Presets that I did for an HDR400 display in my Mega Bezel Preset Pack though.
See the following posts for some additional guidelines/advice.
By the way, have you updated your RetroArch and tried my latest CyberLab Guest Preset Pack?
You can also take a look at the following shaders which might be more suited to users with dimmer displays:
I recently made some presets essentially without the Mask and Phosphors for brightness challenged displays in my miniLED Epic Preset Pack. They’re called PVM/Pro Monitor Edition:
This is a photo of one of my presets in action:
Another, thing I forgot to add. If you have an issue with a Preset, it helps a great deal if you post the exact Filename of the Preset and Preset Pack it belongs to.
These are some more presets which can work for brightness challenged displays:
To really appreciate these screenshots, you either need to zoom in or view at native resolution
These are photos of the HDR400 display I was referring to earlier:
From the CyberLab CRT-Royale preset pack’s Readme.txt:
1440p users can probably try the Fine presets. They might work. Otherwise just play around with the “Mask - Triad Size Desired” Shader Parameter.
1080p users can probably set the “Mask - Triad Size Desired” Shader Parameter to 3.00. Otherwise just play around with it until it looks good to you.
You can play around with this value until it looks good to you.
Another one you can adjust is the “Mask Sample Mode” - Set it to 0 for a sharper, less filtered look and 1 for a slightly softer, less harsh look to the phosphors.
Thank you for your thoughtful and thorough reply! It was very encouraging, and I appreciate your patient effort to bridge my knowledge & experience gap. I do not have a nostalgic memory of CRT displays, so my reference point or “goal” is vague and based off your provided photos and stuff I see on YouTube. I generally shoot for what I think a Sony Trinitron would look like. As a result of this post, I have started searching for a CRT locally so that I can experience a valid point of reference for myself.
You were spot on in guessing that my issues were clipping in whites/highlights and oversaturation. Your explanation of how you choose a reference point helped me understand that I was overlooking pieces of my pipeline as well.
I have since spent a few days recalibrating the settings of my main TV to eliminate any clipping and oversaturation in its settings, then recalibrating & fine tooth combing the Windows display settings to eliminate clipping/oversaturation (turning off AutoHDR in THREE places! grr!), and finally recalibrating RetroArch’s HDR settings to eliminate clipping/oversaturation. I now have a perfectly satisfactory image with Windows HDR and RetroArch HDR both turned ON, so I am no longer shooting for that HDR-less bare minimum.
When I apply any of your CRT-Royale or Megatron NX W420M presets, it always initially introduces clipping, oversaturation, and/or washout. I actually believe that I will eventually be able to get to a satisfactory image by adjusting saturation, gamma, contrast, peak luminance, and paper white, despite the fact that at this point I am still running around a maze in the dark with how to balance those settings between one another.
I noticed that not all of the presets’ settings are at their defaults when I first load the presets. Setting them all back to defaults gets me much closer to an “accurate” image than what they are set to initially. Are your shaders meant to be packaged at not-default values?
I have not tried your latest CyberLab Guest Preset Pack. I just downloaded it, and read the readme which has some helpful notes on settings to use. I’ll try it next time I have a chance! Do you think that this pack would serve me better than CRT-Royale or Megatron NX W420M, or is it just a preference thing?
You said it would be helpful if I listed my display and specs. Here are the details!
TV:
Model Code: QN77S90DDFXZA
Samsung S90D Series (2024)
77 inch
QD-OLED
4k Ultra HD (3840x2160 Native Resolution)
1,200 nits peak (this is a guess based on Google search results)
PC:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X 8-Core Processor, 3.80 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
RAM: 32 GB
Windows 11 Home, 64-bit
HDMI Cord:
Maxonar
Certified HDMI 2.1
48 GBPS "Ultra High Speed"
RetroArch:
Version 1.22.2
Build Date: Nov 20 2025
RetroArch HDR:
Enable HDR > ON
Peak Luminance > 2430.0x
Paper White Luminance > 240.0x
Contrast > 6.00x
Expand Gamut > ON
Windows Settings:
Settings > System > Display > Color Profile > Profile 4 S90D Game Mode (I made this with Windows HDR Calibration app)
Settings > System > Display > HDR > HDR > ON
Settings > System > Display > HDR > Auto HDR > OFF
Settings > System > Display > HDR > SDR Content Brightness > 20
Settings > System > Display > Scale > 150%
Settings > System > Display > Display Resolution > 3840 x 2160
Settings > System > Display > Advanced Display > Choose a refresh rate > 120 Hz
Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Auto HDR > OFF
Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Optimizations for windowed games > OFF
Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Advanced graphics settings > Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling > ON
Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Custom settings for applications > RetroArch > AutoHDR > OFF
Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Custom settings for applications > RetroArch > Optimizations for windowed games > OFF
Settings > Personalization > Fonts > Related settings > Adjust ClearType text > Turn on ClearType > ON
TV Settings (stop all smart/auto adjustments, goal of accuracy and no clipping):
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Brightness > 50
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Contrast > 45
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Sharpness > 10
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Color > 30
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Tint (G/R) > 0
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Contrast Enhancer > Off
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > HDR Tone Mapping > Static
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Color Tone > Warm2
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > White Balance > 2 point
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Gamma > ST.2084
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > ST.2084 > 0
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Shadow Detail > 0
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Color Space Setting > Normal
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Color Booster > Off
Settings > Picture > Expert Settings > Peak Brightness > High
Settings > Connection > External Device Manager > Input Signal Plus > ON for all inputs
Settings > Connection > External Device Manager > HDMI Black Level > Normal
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Game Mode > ON
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Virtual Aim Point > Off
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Surround Sound > Off
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Dynamic Black Equalizer > 0
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Game Motion Plus (grayed out, unavailable)
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Game Picture Expert > HDR10+ Gaming > Basic
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Game Picture Expert > Game HDR > Off
Settings > Connection > Game Mode Settings > Minimap Auto Detection > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Intelligent Mode Settings > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving > Brightness Optimization > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving > Energy Saving Solution > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving > Motion Lighting > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving > Auto Power Saving > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving > Auto Power Off > Off
Settings > General & Privacy > Start Screen Option > Start with Smart Hub Home > Off
Thank you again for your time and patience. For someone like me, who is chasing a realistic CRT look with no experience, it literally takes reading over your post (particularly the second paragraph) 3 or more times to digest it. Then I start googling words you used and reading whole wikipedia pages and reddit posts just to try to understand the concepts so that I can come back and read your post again, hopefully with actual comprehension.
Thanks for the detailed response. It would also be nice if you could include some photos of the screen showing the issues you’re experiencing.
Try the latest preset packs, you might have better luck in the accuracy department those were designed using older displays with certain colour limitations and the presets were designed to work around them.
You might have to update your RetroArch to one of the newer nightly builds to take advantage of the changes and improvements to the HDR implementation in RetroArch.
Although this setting is actually relative and not absolute, I suspect this is way too high for your display. It’s probably more than double the actual Peak Brightness of your display.
You don’t even have to run the Peak Brightness at the maximum that your display can handle to have a great experience with these things. It all has to be balanced.
So it’s better to start off conservatively and have things look good but be too dark, then increase the Peak and Paper White Luminance values gradually.
This also seems very high. 5.00x to 5.30x should be more than sufficient.
Start off with the Megatron miniLED Epic and Guest Legendary Preset Packs. They’re called Legendary and Epic for a reason.
Once you stick to the newer more refined presets you shouldn’t have to do much adjusting of Saturation, Contrast, Gamma and stuff like that unless your TV has some sort of calibration issue.
Paper White Luminance plays a more significant role in the overall brightness than the Peak Luminance by the way and this is supposed to be adjusted in the Shader Parameters of my Megatron presets.
The settings in the Settings–»Video–>HDR menu are for non-Sony Megatron presets. However with the new updates to RetroArch and Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor the default behavior is for all brightness adjustments/calibration to be done in this menu for all shaders in HDR mode. The old methods are still included as a fall back option though.
The new method simplifies things as well and does away with separate Peak and Paper White Luminance settings in favour of a single HDR brightness setting.
You no longer have to rely on RTINGS to find your display’s Peak Luminance setting. Just increase HDR Brightness until the image is bright enough.
That’s the point. They are custom settings. My custom settings.
If that is the case use what looks best to you. As I mentioned before some presets especially in my W420M Preset pack were designed to work on displays which cannot do 4K 60Hz at RGB 4:4:4 so the colours would be boosted in order to compensate for the limitations of that particular display.
On some older presets, I used to sit far away from an older OLED TV, so Saturation and brightness might have been boosted a bit as things look differently when far from the screen.
That is the reason for my Near Field presets.
Auto HDR is nice. It shouldn’t affect RetroArch once HDR is On in RetroArch.
Also W420M presets are all in SDR mode by default. So if you want to run them in HDR mode you have to turn on HDR Mode in the Shader Parameters.
You can also leave that on SDR mode and use the setting in the Settings–»Video–>HDR menu or let Windows AutoHDR or Special K handle things though but those are presets designed in SDR mode and to run on an SDR display.
You might have to calibrate all of these using a good point of reference. I know certain things I can rely on for that, including my presets but for you it might be something else but you have to choose one because you don’t want to be adjusting the presets and the TV back and forth to fix each other.
As mentioned before it should serve you much better than those 2 you mentioned specifically because of their age and the equipment they were designed on and targeted.
I recently tried some of my CRT-Royale presets on an older TV that I have that I brought back into service and at first some of the presets weren’t even working properly, this is because of colourspace settings that weren’t compatible with that particular set. I started doing some tweaks and everything was excellent once again. Those updated CRT-Royale presets are due for release sometime in the future.
I feel insulted. Lol.
What more of a reference do you need than this?
By the way, the creator of the Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor shader as well as the authour of RetroArch’s HDR implementation uses a Samsung S95B QD-OLED as one of his test displays. He’s hardly around these days but he might have some insight as to what settings work better on Samsung QD-OLED TVs.
After you update your RetroArch to the latest nightly, then update your Slang Shaders using the Online Updater, you can try some of his newest presets in the Shaders/Shaders_Slang/HDR folder.
Also, if you’re obsessed with accuracy, you have the wrong display technology as QD-OLEDs triangular subpixel layout doesn’t match what is required for subpixel accurate CRT Shaders to approximate the layout and structure of a CRT’s Mask and phosphors, unfortunately.
RWBG W-OLEDs come close enough, while RGB striped LCD panels offer the best compatibility with all currently emulated CRT mask types and TVLs - whch in CRT emulation is how fine or coarse the phosphor/mask is.
This is another method you could try:
You can take a look at this regarding the Game HDR setting on your TV:
Don’t just read the AI generated summary, I suggest you read all of the source articles, posts and watch the videos.
A note on W420M presets:
In general note concerning most if not all of my Megatron presets which use an additional Grade Pass near the top of the Shader Parameters list which has a White Point setting plus another White Point setting near the bottom of the Shader Parameters list. It’s safe to leave the bottom (second) one at 6504 instead of 5504 and the set the top (first) one to 6104 instead of 7104 as the net effect would be the same.
If you want to go further and neutralize the White Point, you can set the top one to 6504 instead of 6104 but 6104 is fine and what the rest of the settings of the preset would have been designed around, including Brightness, Gamma and Saturation and according to the creator of Grade typical CRT displsays weren’t all used at exactly 6504 anyway.
This might help with respect to getting your Peak and Paper White Luminance settings and Contrast settings to a better starting point if you still want to fiddle around a bit with the old HDR implementation before you update your RetroArch:
I had a question about the CyberLab Megatron NX Death To Pixels 4K HDR Shader Preset Pack
Well two questions actually:
In the readme for this pack it says in Retroarch to use an Aspect Ration of Config @ 1.24. When I do this it makes everything look skinnier than it should so I’m not sure if I’m missing something somewhere else?
Also, the Retroarch HDR settings seem like they have updated/simplified recently. There is just one Brightness option, vs the previous two of Display’s Peak Luminance and Display’s Paper White Luminance. How do these line up with the Retroarch and the actual Shader Parameters? Does one area override the other?
At that the time of writing that I noticed some anomolies with certain power bars/guages in SNES games and setting the aspect ratio to 1.24 cleared that up. Besides the installation instructions those other things are just records of my settings which users are free to use as a starting point and also to experiment or use different settings if they think they will work better for them.
Turning on Integer Scaling and setting the Aspect Ratio to Config works fine as well but I prefer doing things manually. I don’t even use the settings in that readme.txt anymore. It’s from 2024 and I’ve done quite a bit of eperimentation since then. If you read some more of the thread you’ll see stuff about Custom Aspect Ratios and stuff like that. I like making the screen smaller while maintaining an Integer Scale on both the X and Y axes. Also some presets look better at certain scale factors, particular those which use Shadow Mask and Slot Mask. Again I’ve made my personal notes available in the thread as well as in the updated readme.txt of subsequent preset packs.
That’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Don’t hesitate to try my newer preset packs. Remember, miniLED is not for miniLED only, it was just designed on miniLED.
The new HDR settings have no bearing on my Sony Megatron based preset packs as the setting in the Shader Parameters have always overriden anything in the Settings–>Video–>HDR Menu.
Those settings have always applied to non Sony Megatron shaders so shaders which don’t have Peak and Paper White Brightness adjustments could be setup using the controls in the HDR Menu.
With these updates comes a new version of Sony Megatron Computer Monitor as well. You can read all about the new changes in the Sony Megatron Computer Monitor thread.
My latest CyberLab Guest Legendary Preset Pack takes full advantage of the new HDR updates. The single HDR Brightness setting means no more looking up Peak Luminance settings on RTINGs and stuff like that. Instead, if things are too dark, just turn up the HDR Brightness and/or backlight/contrast/brightness of your display.
My new pack also comes with an extensive readme.txt overhaul which you might find interesting because it contains new scaling suggestions among other things.
The updates to Sony Megaton Colour Video Monitor also have no effect on my previous Sony Megatron based Shader Preset Packs. The updates have been done in a way that users who prefer the old way of doing things can keep doing them that way and even apply the old methods to other shaders as well. The new way treats Sony Megatron the same as other shaders so all HDR settings take place in the Settings–>Video–>HDR menu.
Feel free to ask more questions if you need more answers.
And then I actually had one thing I was wondering about the brand new CyberLab Guest Legendary Death To Pixels 4K HDR Shader Preset Pack
I don’t have the brightest 4K QD-OLED Monitor (DELL S3225QC) but it does have a very good HDR picture according to rtings, and it has both DisplayHDR True Black 400 and HDR Peak 1000 options. I currently have it using the Peak 1000 option. I’ve found some options in the NX 4K HDR pack for SNES that I think look amazing with both the color and the brightness.
With this Legendary 4K HDR pack though I feel like I’m missing something. I’ve followed all the instructions and prerequisites in the readme. Your post a few posts above here from a week ago or so about the introduction to this new Legendary pack has a bunch of screen shots. They all look good but they also VERY dark to me.
And then trying out all the shader presets look much darker on my monitor than the NX using the exact same Retroarch HDR options (Brightness = 1030 - same as HDR calibration tool, Colour Boost = Expanded, Scanlines = ON, Subpixel Layout = RGB - to match this monitor). Am I missing something in setup or are these presets just a alot darker in general? Like I said the screen shots above just look really dark to me, some almost black.
It would help if you shared some examples showing the exact filenames. Also, some photos of the screen would be nice showing both the presets which are bright enough as well as the not so bright ones.
In my previous preset packs, I’ve tweaked the Gamma as well (the one below the Saturation near the bottom of the shader parameters list. So maybe that could be a factor.
With CRT-Guest-Advanced based presets, you can gain additional brightness by adjusting the Gamma C, Bright Boost, Bloom, Halation and lowering Mask Strength.
However in this case, it is expected that you would just turn the HDR brightness up until you either get satisfactory brightness or until you’ve reached the maximum brightness that your display can deliver without causing clipping in whites/highlights or oversaturation of colours.
Why did you stop increasing the HDR Brightness at 1030? That HDR Brightness does not directly correspond to the peak brightness rating of your display. It is not an absolute value either as it depends on the configuration of the rest of the preset for example scanline dynamics setup, mask choice e.t.c.
So pay less attention to the number and pay more attention to how it looks after setting the Opacity of your UI to 0.
You should definitely try my Sony Megatron MiniLED Epic preset pack and in particular my PVM Edition presets as they are tuned for high brightness on a wider range of hardware. Also the presets with W# at the end are the latest in that pack.
I also hope you’re not attempting to use BFI with that limited amount of Brightness to go around.
For what it’s worth, my current display can put out up to 2,400 nits Peak Brightness according to the manufacturer.
Feel free to try my 4K HDR Ready Mega Bezel Presets as well in my Mega Bezel Presets Pack or my CRT-Royale Preset Pack as they were Optimized for lower brightness output displays.
Do increase the HDR Brightness before giving up though.
Take a look at this recent Discord post to get a better understanding of what’s going on here:
Also note that those NX presets were designed on an LG OLED TV with about 630 to 700 Nits Peak Brightness so things would have been pushed to the absolute limits before clipping.
Since I have a much brighter display now, it’s not surprising that a user with a dimmer display might not have the same experience as me at least out of the box.
You can use the 240p Test Suite to get an idea of how high you can push HDR Brightness and Colour Saturation on your display before things start clipping on the Colour Bars and Gray Ramp tests.
I’m looking forward to hearing some more feedback after you tweak some more.
I hope you know that for screenshots to look at bright as they look on my display you would need to have the similar brightness output from your display and you most definitely would need to view them Fullscreen or zoomed in.
If viewing a thumbnail or zoomed out Image, they would also look dimmer/darker.
The settings in the Settings–»Video–»HDR Menu, except HDR - On or HDR - , have no bearing whatsoever on the NX presets as that is based on Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor and the Peak and Paper White Brightness Settings are all in the Shader Parameters Menu.
If the Legendary Guest presets are so much darker for you, I suggest you turn up the HDR Brightness some more and/or increase the OLED Light and Contrast settings of your display or whatever settings brighten the display.
If the screenshots are looking dark and almost black when viewed using the Windows Photo Viewer, it’s a sign that the HDR Calibration is too Dark, what do you have your SDR Content Slider On?
Also note that those screenshots were converted from HDR *.jxr files to SDR *.jpg files so a lot would be lost in the brightness and tonemapping front. Perhaps if you viewed the original HDR files, they might look brighter when viewed on your display in HDR Mode.
Awesome, thanks for all the info! I’ll have to poke around more. I was thinking for the Retroarch HDR settings that the new single Brightness setting is meant to indicate the max nits of the display, since it does say that somewhat in the help text below it, and 1030 was what I had figured out with the windows HDR calibration tool. I’ll have to try setting that brighter. And I’m starting to much better understand the difference between the packs where they RetroArch HDR setting make a difference vs. the ones where the shader preset setting override that.
From what you are saying it sounds like my monitor just isn’t bright enough for your newest Legendary pack, which is a bummer as those sound awesome!
I’ve downloaded the MiniLED Epic pack to play around with as well. I have looked at your CRT-Royale pack as well and found some options that look really good but I wasn’t sure if those were as current due to how you were saying that some of the packs and readme’s are getting somewhat outdated.
And yeah that was a bit of a smack my forehead moment when it comes to the screen shots, it does make sense that they would look different from an even brighter screen! I’m only starting to step into the world of OLED PC monitors and this is my first 4K one. My previous 1440p has HDR but it’s not really worth using, and I do have an LG OLED B5 (I think) from 2020 but I’ve never really used that for gaming.
I’ll go back with some of your advice and see what I can find, thanks again for all the great info and the truly amazing work you’ve done with all of these.
Definitely not and it never worked like that. Maybe if you used a neutral preset then set the Peak and Paper White Luminance up before adjusting anything else it might have roughly corresponded with manufacturer Peak Luminance values but the way those things are measured also varies a lot depending on the content and Window Sizes.
Then once you touch a single other setting which affects brightness, it skews everything and there are many settings which affects brightness.
Very good!
While all of the packs can be considered experimental, there are timeless presets in every one of them. The last two should probably have a higher percentage of high quality vs experimental presets which was intentionally done to make things simpler to locate.
That’s not what I was saying. You really have to view the presets fullscreen or zoomed in, plus calibrate your display and Windows to maximize the brightness output of your display to view them at the best your display is capable of.
Since you got satisfactory results from some of my NX presets, I’m pretty confident that you should be able to run the Guest Legendary presets with satisfactory brightness.
You might just need to practice pushing the HDR Brightness and looking for the clipping in the highlights/whites that tells you that you’ve reached the limit of what the display is capable of.
As mentioned before, besides your favourite games, you can use the 240p Test Suite to confirm that you’re still seeing all shades in the Colour Bars and Grey Ramp Tests.
In order to do this, you can load the game or 240p Test Suite for the system that matches the preset that you’re trying to calibrate the brightness for.
Remember I’m using BFI which costs a lot of brightness. If you don’t use BFI you can retain a lot of brightness.
I strongly recommend that you try my Epic PVM/Pro Monitor Edition Presets from my previous pack. Those should look pretty bright for you as well.
I wish that the Retroarch HDR option was a little more clear because this is a big part of what was throwing me off. It currently says for the Brightness option - "Sets the HDR brightness level in nits. Use in combination with your display’s physical brightness settings. For a starting point, set this to 80 and your display’s brightness to full. Alternatively, set this to the max nits of your display and turn your display’s brightness down until it looks right.
I think there is a big difference when working with HDR TVs and HDR Monitors because as far as I can tell when HDR is on I have no control over the monitor brightness. On either of my HDR monitors it seems. Brightness and Contrast are actually greyed out when you activate HDR. Unlike my LG OLED TV which has many more settings. So I can just do what the Window HDR calibration lets me do for setting the max nits.
I wasn’t reading the settings detail in Retroarch quite right so I was thinking I could only set it to anywhere between 80 and 1030 at absolute max (my monitor’s peak brightness according to the Win calibration). I didn’t even think to set it over that, and doing so (like you said) absolutely opened up the worlds of your Legendary and MiniLED Epic sets.
That’s not what I was saying.
I apologize, that was a misunderstanding on my part. you said earlier:
I also hope you’re not attempting to use BFI with that limited amount of Brightness to go around.
And I mistook that to you saying I couldn’t use the Legendary set due to my lower max brightness (since each preset in that pack has the word BFI in the name I thought that’s what you meant). I hadn’t heard of BFI before and had to look it up, it does not appear to be an option for my monitor.
So far I’m having much better luck with the options in the Legenday and MiniLED Epic sets. I’ve been poking around in the Mega Bezel ones as well and I really like the Neo-GX 4K presets. For some reason I haven’t been able to use the Mega Bezel 4K HDR presets in your pack as they all give me a “Failed to apply shader preset error” but it’s only those ones, everything else in Mega Bezel works. I have the most current version of your files, they are in the “Mega_Bezel_Packs” folder, and I have the matching 1.14.0 megabezel so I’m not sure why just the 4K HDR ones aren’t working.
But that’s all aside, I feel like I’m moving away from Mega Bezel in general and I like your most resent sets of packs, especially as they are working much better for me on the brightness side.
Thank you so much for all of your guidance so far. I’ve also been taking a look at that 240p Test Suite as I hadn’t heard of that before!
They were designed with BFI (or similar technologies) in mind that section of the filenames are notes on the development environment basically. BFI is extremely important for motion clarity on modern displays. If you think your games are playing smoothly now, then you haven’t seen anything yet.
Once you’ve gotten your brightness sorted out, you can start experimenting with different forms of BFI. There’s Hardware BFI, which might be called different things by your display manufacturer. Even if it doesn’t include a hardware option, RetroArch has extensive BFI solutions. The most basic of which is in the Settigs–»Video–»Synchronization Menu.
Then there is the CRT-Beam-Simulator Shader which is a more evolved take on BFI that you can Prepend to other Shaders.
These are located in the Shaders/Shaders_Slang/subframe-bfi Folder. You can also try adaptive_strobe-koko.
These allow you to balance additional motion clarity with brightness. You can benefit from disabling any LCD anti-image retention options.
“Old” doesn’t mean obsolete at least when it comes to CyberLab Death To Pixels CRT Shader Presets.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I was able to reproduce this so I’ll look into it some more.
Those 4K HDR Ready presets are mostly based on my favourites from my Neo-GX pack anyway. I tweaked them for HDR use. You can apply those tweaks on your own. They are also designed for low brightness monitors (displayHDR400) so they might come in handy when you start to play around with BFI.
This is what I did to rebalance the brightness for use with HDR displays:
On another note, if you had HDR On in the RetroArch settings menu while trying my W20M presets, that could be reason for things looking extremely oversaturated. Generally HDR needs to be Off in the RetroArch HDR menu for those presets. You can use them with HDR On but you might just have to turn up your HDR Bightness is things look too dark and oversaturated at the same time. Once you get the brightness dialed in, if still oversaturated, you can lower the Saturation in Shader Parameters.
I mentioned earlier that the colours might be a little weird due to the TV I was targeting not being able to do RGB 4:4:4 Full without Chroma Compression but besides that, different Masks always skew the colours slightly, Shadow Mask does it more so than Aperture Grill and Slot Mask.
Update:
I took a look at the 4K HDR Ready Presets issue and I have a suspicion that it’s being caused by some recent changes in RetroArch.
It seems to be that the paths and filenames in the shader chain are exceeding the character limit. This didn’t occur before and all of those presets were tested. The filenames are definitely on the long side. @hunterk Can you take a look at this please? It could be related to the recent changes with respect to the deferred shader loading on a separate thread updates.
[WARN] [Shaders] Could not read shader preset in #reference line: "C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\RetroArch\shaders\Mega_Bezel_Packs\CyberLab\MBZ__0__Smooth-Advance_Full_Reflections\CyberLab_4K_HDR_Presets\CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_Composite_Shadow_Mask_Smooth_".
[WARN] [Shaders] Could not read root preset: "C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\RetroArch\shaders\Mega_Bezel_Packs\CyberLab\MBZ__1__Advance_Full_Reflections\CyberLab_4K_HDR_Presets\CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_Composite_Shadow_Mask_Smooth_Neo-GX_Ultra_HDR_Fine_Epic.slangp".
[ERROR] [Vulkan] Deferred: failed to create chain for "C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\RetroArch\shaders\Mega_Bezel_Packs\CyberLab\MBZ__1__Advance_Full_Reflections\CyberLab_4K_HDR_Presets\CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_Composite_Shadow_Mask_Smooth_Neo-GX_Ultra_HDR_Fine_Epic.slangp".
OK you are probably going to laugh at this but after following all of your advice I now have versions of both the Legendary presets, as well as the miniLED that you recommended looking STUNNING.
Cranking up the HDR brightness, whether in the Retroarch options or the shader depending on the preset, absolutely had the effect you were trying to tell me about. That’s one part of it.
But something I’ve been struggling with a bit, with all nicer shaders and this monitor lately, was how the actual scanlines or different masks just were looking so big to me and more visible than they should be.
Well I’m primarily a PC gaming who sits at a desk. This is the largest PC monitor I’ve ever had, previously 27" was the biggest I’d ever had and this is 32". I’m used to sitting up pretty close to my monitor.
Well I cranked up the brightness AND moved a few feet back and it was like I was looking at something else entirely. The CRT effect matched with the brightness just blew me away.
Thanks again for all of your patience and dealing with my mostly dumb questions. There were just a few misconceptions and things I wasn’t taking into account with all this to begin with.
There’s at least one preset with a much shorter filename in the same folder and that loads correctly. That’s in the log as well. Also in the log, I can see where the longer filenames are being truncated.
I’ll post the entire log for you. Also note that this pack hasn’t been updated in a very long time and all presets were tested and working a long time ago.
Update: @Hunterk Seems like I could definitely optimize and update these paths to get the presets to work.
not including " 185 characters limit
[WARN] [Shaders] Could not read shader preset in #reference line: "C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\RetroArch\shaders\Mega_Bezel_Packs\CyberLab\MBZ__3__Standard_Full_Reflections\4K_Optimized_Presets\Console_Specific_Presets\CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_Composite_Slot_Mas".
not including " 228 characters limit
[WARN] [Shaders] Could not read shader preset in #reference line: “C:\Users\xxxx\Downloads\RetroArch\shaders\Mega_Bezel_Packs\CyberLab\MBZ__0__Smooth-Advance_Full_Reflections\4K_Optimized_Presets\Console_Specific_Presets\CyberLab_Genesis_Composite_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_for_CyberLab_Blargg_Video_Fil”.
Here is a second log after optimizing paths and fixing 15 of the 17 presets:
Is there a character limit which is causing these final presets not to load? They’re referencing presets several folders deep and each of them has relatively long filenames. Is it that the character limit was lowered at some point over the last few months or year?
This is what I like to hear! Feel free to post pics showing how the stuff looks to you. I don’t get much visual feedback from users.
This would have to do with the TVL and sharpness of the preset most likely. You can try presets with “Fine”, “Near Field”, Le’Sarsh", “Smooth” or “PVM/Pro Monitor Edition” in their filenames as well as some of my newer Shadow Mask presets for a less harsh/coarse Mask/Scanline experience. Do note that if you sit close enough to a large enough CRT TV you would also notice the scanline gaps and screen door effect provided by the Mask/Phosphor especially on a lower TVL set.
You can also try lowering the Integer Scale Factors which will give you a smaller window/viewport size. Things tend to look a bit denser and clearer as you scale down in my opinion and you get the added bonus of additional brightness headroom.
Another thing to consider is that due to the triangular subpixel layout of your QD-OLED monitor, you’re not able to experience the emulated Mask and Phosphors rendered correctly and the imperfections and artifacts of this imperfect rendering might be slightly distorting the experience especially when closer to the screen.
For proper subpixel Mask and Phospher Rendering you’ll need an RGB Stripe Subpixel Layout LCD for perfect rendering, BGR Striped Layout LCD for near perfect rendering or RWBG WOLED Display for good but not perfect rendering.
You can see more here:
If you have the time, feel free to run the following tests and post the results. I’m always interested in gathering data about how different panel types perform with shaders:
I finally had a lull in my work schedule and sat down to try out the Legendary PSX Composite shader with SotN.
Not like one of my most cherished games, but it’s such a great game to understand shader differences.
After I set my HDR brightness to 2300 nits things were pretty nice, but VERY green.
Switched to Mask 13, Size 1, BGR, and had to put Base (black) Mask Strength to 0 but now I feel like I finally got to experience a true Cyberlabs Shader.
This is the subpixel order of Mask 13 on a white screen. Interesting.
BXRYWC
Things generally look pretty perfect. At least for my current understanding of what things should look like Shader wise.
Mask 8 Size 2 either order looks just like Mask 13 Size 1 BGR. I believe that’s the panel agnostic mask?
Color correctness wise, this probably makes sense if we think of BWRG to be 3 subpixels wide at 4K Size 1 Mask 1.
B+W, W+R, R+G
Normally I very much dislike when there’s a black line in the Mask. Like RRGGBBX doesn’t look good to my eyes. 300TVL in general doesn’t look good to my eyes, too thick. Mask 12 also has that VERY green tint to it on top of all the solid colors like a blue or red background looking unusually broken up into unnatural TVL’s with extra thick black lines breaking up the TVL’s. Like I’d get two normal TVL’s then an all black one. (to my eyes)
Mask 14 has good color correctness, but this same kind of odd thick black line in solid color backgrounds:
Good thing my CyberLab Guest Legendary Preset Pack has only 1 preset (out of 48) which uses Mask 12, which was only added less than 24 hours ago.
Very good.
A picture paints a thousand words.
Hmm, while I’m glad you’ve gotten things to look good on your setup, if you look around this thread, you might notice that one of the signature characteristics of CyberLab Death To Pixels Presets is being able to go straight up to the screen and see the RGB phosphors in all their glory.
This same pattern would look very different on different panel types depending on subpixel layout. It’s like you’re asking me to translate something which is visual in nature by using theory and science, while I would much prefer to see what the output actually looks like on the particular display in a practical sense, especially with me not being an expert on subpixel science.
More theory but no testing, where are the macro photos which would make this all easier as we would see what is happening with the alignment and subpixel order e.t.c.?
I have no idea. Is this a screenshot or photo? Scaling settings can affect things like that. Are you using Integer Scaling on both the X and Y axes?
I don’t know what any of these Masks look like off hand so I’ll have to refer to the CRT Guest Advanced thread or load up a preset and look at them myself. I know that one of them should be a B&W Mask so yeah, that should be subpixel agnostic.
I’m not trying to pressure or force you to do anything especially since you indicated that for you, taking some photos of the screen showing different known RGB subpixel mask patterns may not be as simple as one might think but I do think that this path seems like beating around the bush and going down a long winding road of workarounds in order to get these things looking good on 4 Stack BWRG Tandem WOLED displays which have been on the market for well over a year now.
I recall when I first became “subpixel aware” when it came to these things, it was thought that the only subpixel mask which could work properly on WOLED displays was the B&W Mask. Even Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor had a B&W Mask. The more I learned and observed, the more I tested and researched. Until I came across a post by @nfp0 where they said that they used Mask 13 (at the time) RRGGBBx, Size 1 for 4K.
Previously I was using Mask 6 (RGB), Size 2 (RRGGBB) and I’m not sure it looked correct on my RWBG WOLED from the perspective of what a subpixel aware CRT Shader Mask is supposed to do, which is mimc a real CRT’s Phosphor and Mask structure/appearance as closely as possible on a modern display.
This led to the creation of the “OLED Subpixels How Do They Work” thread because I realized how badly some of the masks looked on my WOLED display and wanted to see if better could be done. Through documentation, trial and error, a little luck and sheer determination, I realized that Mask 12 RRGGBBX with the BGR layout (XRRBBGG or RRBBGGX) finally gave a near perfect phosphor triad with excellent alignment.
Prior to this I enjoyed CRT Shaders on my OLED very much but they didn’t look quite right when right up to the screen. I even experienced this when I made my CRT Royale preset pack because that uses exclusively RGB layout masks, of course Hyllian has now made a BGR version available but we now know that even this wouldn’t work for RWBG WOLED as it requires an RBG subpixel layout.
This is ironic because CRT-Guest-Advanced never “advertised” or documented an “RBG” supixel order mask as being available so it seemed like a mere coincidence that that was the missing link. The evidence adds up as well because before my advocacy and inclusion of IV OLED presets, the consensus among the CRT Shader crowd was that WOLED could not be properly supported due to the white subpixel getting in the way of things.
Just to demonstrate how accidental this might have been, Guest.R attempted to update the “BGR” Subpixel layout for improved alignment and it completely broke RWBG support. Things went from something that looked like CRT phosphor triads to the mangled mess it used to be before. I mentioned it to him and he kindly and promptly reverted the change.
Right now I’m having some issues using “BGR” Mask Layout 1 on my TCL QM751G which is supposed to be BGR so I’m actually using RGB Mask Layout 0. I know very well not to bring it to Guest.R’s attention before I have gathered all of the requisite photographic empirical evidence and formulated exactly how I’m going to describe my “issue” and what I might want to ask him to do about it. I know that I most certainly need to start by verifying the subpixel order of my display on my own as although the model has been tested and stated to be BGR, who knows, maybe my size uses a different layout? Only proper testing would show. I’m having fun though the emulated phosphors do look “RGB” with proper alignment although the slot masks sometimes look a little strange using the naked eye, they look like the horizontal slot isn’t going straight across, it looks like the slot is slghtly higher over the red subpixels. It could be an illusion though. Maybe glasses or some macro photos might enable us to better observe exactly what is taking place.
One thing for sure is that “BRG” (RBG) Mask Layout 1 does not look correct on my current display.
Of course if only finer masks with higher TVLs are your cup of tea or if you never go right up to the screen to peep at the RGB phosphors you might think that everything is above board which is exactly what happens with my CRT-Royale or my older presets which used Mask 6, Size 2 on my RWBG WOLED display because this is not something you can see with the naked eye at typical viewing distances. So ignorance is bliss and I think that this is what is happening with the vast majority of users who are buying OLED displays for CRT emualation because they know about OLED’s fast pixel response times and their true blacks and perfect viewing angles. They might know about the CRT-Beam-Simulator as well.
Most of them may not know about subpixel mask emulation and what it entails or requires so they might go out and purchase a QD-OLED display thinking that they got the best of the best tech not knowing that QD-OLED is actually much worse than RWBG WOLED for subpixel aware CRT Shader Emulation and they may not know that OLED’s may not be the best displays for accurate CRT-Shader emulation due to their relative lack of brightness compared to other technologies.
