Yeah it has definitely been an interesting time with different Megatron and nesguy presets.
I would try maxing my nits out (2300 is my 10% window max) testing Megatron and nesguy presets.
But I don’t think I cycled through the Masks with the NESguy presets in combination with the Nits higher than 500. I legit felt so lost looking at what feel like near monochrome or at best, overly green colors.
I’ll try some photos later. As long as work doesn’t ramp up again I’ll try and get some close-up pictures while I’m re-focusing on this.
This even let me finally experience BFI in action without detracting brightness drop. Cause OLED motion on its own certainly isn’t Plasma I must say…very curious about these pulsar displays and what the state of $2500 TV’s will be like in 2032!
Didn’t even have to turn up my Luminance past where it needs to be for the gamma curve on the Luminance tracking chart.
Whatever technology comes next is going to be really surprising if it’s not capable of all the CRT emulation aspects that are super important. Look at them chase 1000hz refresh rates with such enthusiasm cause of those Blur Busters hype. Things were so stagnant in the display industry when they introduced 4K even though nothing could handle the bandwidth needed for it. It’s refreshing to see advancing technologies again.
Peak Luminance, Paper White Luminance and HDR Brightness are not absolutes which correspond to the specifications of your display. They are all relative and conditionally based on the many other setings which can affect Luminance. So try setting these values based on eyeballing if the preset looks bright enough, rather than a specific figure. If you push it too far you need to learn how to spot clipping and oversaturation. Running your favourite preset through the 240P Test suite can help with that if you aren’t sure what to look for in your favourite games.
You have to get used to dialing in the de judder and blur reduction settings to find the sweet spot but that doesn’t apply to gaming scenarios though. For, that you need higher refresh rates and CRT-Beam-Simulator type technology which works best on OLED so Pulsar isn’t really needed.
A few posts up I left a link for Shader Beam. You should really be using that or prepending CRT Beam Simulator or koko’s Apaptive Strobe BFI instead of old school BFI. They provide better motion clarity with less brightness loss and perceived flickering than traditional BFI.
We already have TVs that can do much better than what I’m using which does an excellent job:
Folks who may not be following may not quite appreciate how far ahead of any other LCD TV to date the TCL X11L’s contrast ratio is. Of course OLED is still superior at least on paper and in absolute terms but with the sheer number of zones (20,000+) and with a high degree of dimming precision (26 bit) which means much more granular control of the brightness level of each zone and the additional color gamut awarded by SQD technology which improved upon the Quantum Dots used in previous QD Displays as well as the improvements to the LCD Colour filters themselves to allow more light to pass through (11,000+ nits) while preserving more colours makes that display a serious contender and I haven’t even talked about the new processing chip with 4x 48Gbps HDMI 2.1 Ports. It also has a strobing backlight like the rest of the TCL lineup.
If only it also came with a native 180Hz panel/refresh rate at 4K RGB 4:4:4 full colour that would have been the icing on the cake.
The QM8L should also be no slouch even though it’s contrast ratio is way lower than the X11L.
They both have a true RGB subpixel layout.
The G5, G6, C6H and Panasonic Z95B all have great potential because remember the entire screen isn’t active when doing accurate CRT Shader Emulation. The scanline gaps aren’t using any power, the pillar boxes at the top and bottom of the screen aren’t using any power, the black borders at the top and bottom of the screen aren’t either. The white subpixel is off, leaving more power budget available for the red, green and blue subpixels. So what you might see in RTINGS and other traditional reviews may not take all of these factors into account.
This is what MajorPainTheCactus the creator of the Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor CRT shader and the person who implanted HDR in RetroArch has to say on this topic:
Yeah I follow it all via HDTVtest’s website. HDR settings in RetroArch being simplified just to the one setting maybe helped a lot here too.
HDR is a lot to learn and take on, so it’s good if you can find which settings to leave static and calibrated.
Like can’t wait for ELMB to be in that 2032 set of flashship TV’s with 480hz+ etc. - we see where we are now with Super QD LED and this stuff, things are finally advancing again. The next decade should be better. We can dream!
The bad news is that Mask 13 was only working in that one game. When I hopped over to Sonic 2 on the Genesis, Mask 0 at Size 3 is good, but tons of deconvergence artifacts. I guess, fringing?
Mask 13 doesn’t work here the same way.
The good news is I’m a lot more motivated to take these photos since I’m understanding a lot more what I’m supposed to see vs. what I don’t see.
I’m also salty here, (Philadelphia word, means feeling stupid) because Mask 13 size 1, Mask 6 size 2, and Mask 0 size 3 are all 300TVL, correct?..sometimes my brain just gets a little frazzled these days. :x
Guess I’ve outgrown 600TVL finally without realizing it and it’s 150TVL that looks bad to me. lol
Which of course right? I was thinking Mask 0 Size 4 and forgot it’s for 8K. (6k?)
@Cyber - OK I’m back with another question. You had said that you would like to see a few screenshots and how you don’t get much visual feedback from users.
I wanted to show you how I have it all setup now and how it’s looking really good to me, and see how it looks to you.
But I have no idea how to get actual screenshots showing HDR on here. The .JXR files from the screenshots taken are way too big to post, like 25-30 MB. I can just change them to JPG and they keep the HDR brightness but they are still the same size. Compressing them converts them to JPG and brings the file size down to 2.5-3ish MB, but they lose all the brightness.
Did I say screenshots? If I did, I meant photos of the screen. Screenshots aren’t going to show the impact the display’s subpixel layout and brightness has on the preset and that’s the type of feedback I’m interested in.
On another note. You can convert *.jxr to *.jpg using IrFanView. Also using IrFanView you can set a custom size limit for *.jpg files and it will adjust the compression/quality settings to fit within that limit.
If you want to post full *.jxr files, you can use a cloud storage and sharing service but I repeat, *.jxr files will only show me what I already know about the presets so I’m not really interested in those.
How does something like this look? I’m no photographer and I’m sure there’s all sorts of settings I could use to get better photos of a screen, it’s definitely hard to get it just right, and I had to compress this from my original photo as that was still a little too big.
For this one I’m using one of the Legendary presets, this specific one is from the Experimental folder, but I’ve been going back and forth on this one and the regular Super Smooth one:
CyberLab Guest 4K HDR Game BFI SNES Composite CyberTron Super Smooth Advanced S.slangp
It looks really good to me! Feel free to take some close up shots as well. Have you began experimenting with BFI/CRT-Beam-Simulator/Shader Beam yet?
I posted some tests which we (the community) can use to evaluate different display types’ performance using subpixel aware CRT Shaders. Feel free to give them a go if you have the time. There are many tips on taking photos of CRT shaders on the screen which also work for taking photos of a real CRT screen!
I took a look at the BFI options in Retroarch but when I tried turning it on it said it disabled the hardcore retroachievements which I tend to like to try for (makes me try some of these older games without things like Save States) so I just let it go for now, I’m definitely interested in learning more at some point. I feel like I’ve just learned a whole lot about shaders in general and how they work with this new monitor and I’m going to just try to actually play some games for a while without falling down even more rabbit holes!
Thank you again for all your help and advice. I’m a child of the 80s, and the early-mid 90s was where I really fell into PC and console gaming, so it’s been a lot of fun trying to do things to reproduce what screens were like back then. I’d actually love to go hunt down some actual CRT monitors and TVs but my wife would probably kill me.
No problem. Shader Beam is independent of RetroArch so it might work with RetroAchievements if you eventually decide to try it. Enjoy it and spread the word to others.
By the way, what HDR Brightness/Peak Luminance/Paper White Luminance settings have you settled on?
To calculate the TVL of a subpixel aware CRT Shader we take the number of vertical pixels of the display then divide it by the number of subpixels in the CRT Shader Mask Layout.
So for Mask 12 RRGGBBX @4K that would be 2160/7 = ~308TVL
for Mask 10 RGBX @4K that would be 2160/4 = 540TVL
for Mask 6 RGB @4K that would be 2160/7 = 720TVL
for Mask 6, Size 2 RRGGBB @4K that would be 2160/7 = 360TVL
for Mask 10 RGBX @1440p that would be 1440/4 = 360TVL
for Mask 6 RGB @1440p that would be 1440/3 = 480TVL
for Mask 6 RGB @1080p that would be 1080/3 = 360TVL
So basically, my CRT was the XBR960, similar to Mask 0, 1080 TVL - so that’s where I set stuff up initially for my 480p shaders so the TV --> CRT shader would seem right. This is so different from everyone else who were using SDTV’s instead so my eyes weren’t used to things yet.
Then I re-did my Presets and got used to playing at 720 TVL with Mask 6, 240p.
Then I re-did my presets with Mask 11 at 540 TVL - the X in RGBX for mask 10 bugged me when looking at solid color backgrounds.
I think when I started experimenting with CRT Yah that’s when I wound up finally adjusting to 308 TVL - and found Mask 13 matched that.
The X in CRT-Yah’s MGX mask bugged me so prevented me from using its 540 TVL setup.
I certainly knew what 300TVL meant when we were talking in the Megatron thread. But I got myself confused in the last month or so as I took that break. #52soon
Yeah, TVL is supposed to be a measure of how many distinct white and black vertical lines can be packed into a width that’s equal to the display’s height, and it’s used to measure the focus and precision of the electron beam. So, not exactly related to mask size, but sort of.
Apparently, TVL is usually bottlenecked by the electron beam’s dot size, which is typically 2x the size of a phosphor triad. We don’t really have that limitation in shaders, so just calculating the number of triads is a reasonable simplification, but it’s not exactly comparable to CRT spec docs, I don’t suppose.
How do you know that it’s the X that’s the problem when you can’t even tell (or at least tell us) if the CRT Shader Masks and Phosphors are properly aligned with the display’s subpixels?
Suppose if things are correctly lined up the spacing is less pronounced or at least is even/proportional? Do you know that the white subpixel in your BWRG WOLED display skews the subpixel spacing making a wider gap between the subpixels adjacent to the White subpixel compared to LCD subpixels? Imagine if this gap was next to the X (dark subpixel) gap that is drawn by the subpixel shader?
Also this hate for the X, do you know that a real CRT’s phosphors are separated by black mask material? If we remove the X then there would essentially be no Shadow Mask/Aperture Grille. How do you think that bodes for accuracy?
It’s not really a hate for it, it just doesn’t look right to me. I also test via SDR on my laptop.
I mean unless masks are purely there for HDR implementation, am I missing that? :o
Without the X, it’s Mask 6. Which I believe both exist fur good reason.
I can think of one good reason. RGB is the only Mask Layout that would provide true 1:1 RGB Subpixels:Phosphors @ 1080p. If we tried to draw the black mask line we’d end up with RGBX which is 1080/4 = 270TVL. Very low and chunky with a lot of black on the screen.
Another good reason is that it can provide more variety at higher resolutions albeit at the cost of structural complexity due to a lack of resolution to proper draw and define all aspects of the CRT’s Mask and phosphor structure verbatim.
So don’t get me wrong, I understand that you’re used to the high TVL stuff and I’m not trying to convince you to like what you don’t like, I’m just discussing the merits of something in case you were wondering or just curious.
These are some examples of how bad things can look on WOLED when the subpixel alignment is wrong:
This is an example of how good things can look on WOLED when the subpixel alignment is as good as possible.
Note how much black is around both the CRT’s phosphors and the OLED’s subpixels. This is using RRBBGGX Mask Layout (or whatever secret variant of it Guest.R uses because Nesguy recently said he felt it was XRRBBGG).
You can see here for further recent discussions on the matter:
No no. Was genuinely starting to wonder it as I typed. Especially after the last day with these.
Wow! I actually remember when that Devon guy posted those screenshots. Forgot all about that because I was worked on that Plasma TV Kuro setup for a year! (9 years when it came to movies)
