My point was that the competition is offering a faster SKU with double the VRAM in this current market and with what the GPU is capable of, it possessing a mere 8GB of VRAM puts some artificial limits on its potential. With a full 16GB RAM, or even 12 or 14GB, it would have been a much easier choice inflated prices aside.
When I assess a product’s relative value, it’s not just about if I can afford it. I want something that is properly balanced. This card might be the epitome of planned obsolescence and nVIDIA is always looking for ways to try to hold back and avoid another 9 and 10 series when we got so much value across the board in addition to the significant generational performance increases.
Does this work with the XBOX Series X / UWP version? I attempted to install and apply but it did not work for me. Wondering if anyone has been successful or if its just not possible. Thanks! looks great
Greetings @futurepr0n! Welcome to Libretro Forums.
I haven’t read of anyone getting these shaders to work on Xbox Series X / UWP version. I don’t like to assume though so I’ll leave it at that. The HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader has some known issues with loading using Direct X, which don’t exist on Vulkan / GLCore. Microsoft Xbox Consoles use Direct X and don’t support Vulkan / GLCore as far as I know.
I have a strong feeling and hope that these issues will be looked at and addressed at some point in the future, which will further widen the base of compatibility and accessibility.
You’re welcome, I’m glad you like my shader presets!
Holy smokes. What kind of magic is this? I’m not lying when i say that applying your shader for the first time, it kinda blew me away. I was already impressed with the stock HSM shaders, but the CRT shader that come with it - although they are nice - they didn’t really gel with me as much as my slightly customized dr-venom preset.
The reflection bezels were incredible, so i was kinda torn. Then i saw somebody recommending your shader presets and without even realizing what they do, i just installed them along with a couple of other bezel packs without reading much of the introductory post. Once i fired them up it i was like “damn, am i crazy or why is the image so crisp?”. This is like experiencing retro games in a whole new way WITHOUT losing any of their retro charm. Beautiful work!
I think they overall experience of getting some these things to work is still quite confusing, so i’m considering writing a reddit post with a more compressed tutorial on how to get the HSM Mega Bezels to work along with your shaders and the Duimon bezel community pack, once i get my head around a few things… because i’m still confused about some aspects and i’m no stranger to modding games and tinkering with my stuff, so if i’m confused about certain steps, many other people will be as well and they won’t get to experience these glorious shaders.
Sorry, i hope it’s okay to break this up into two posts, but i got a few questions as well:
Which parameter do i need to adjust to turn up the brightness a little?
With Tekken 3 i encountered a strange issue, after the boot logo when the first video sequence starts playing, the aspect ration suddenly switched to almost a top/down Nintendo DS like format, or as if you turn 16:9 by 90°. So it squashed the image horizontally. I went into the shader parameters and adjusted the aspect ration manually and it worked, but unfortunately the image got all fuzzy like it’s missing half of the pixels on the horizontal axis. Any clue what the problem is here? I haven’t tried every single game in my library, but so far every other game works perfectly.
I’m still very confused as to how i can use your shader along side the DUIMON bezels. I looked up a few posts in here and tried following the instructions, but it’s too vague, there seems to be something i’m missing. Is there a detailed tutorial anywhere on how to do this?
There are several parameters that can be used. There’s no free lunch though. Once you go too far with one parameter, it can mess up the image in other ways.
There’s Post CRT Brightness, Grade as well as GDV Brightness settings. Increasing Halation also increases brightness. Adjusting the scanline shape, deconvergence and also Scanline Type. Mask Strength as well.
Which of my presets are you trying to make brighter?
That Tekken 3 problem is a known issue. I’ll let @HyperspaceMadness know. It uses a strange resolution for its aspect ratio and that throws off the detection in HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. I’m sure there’s a workaround available here or in the Mega Bezel Thread.
This stuff like many other things in life has a learning curve. The easiest way to begin to understand is to open up your favourite preset and look at the 1st line of code that says reference.
There should be a filename and/or path.
Open the file being referenced and look at the filename being referenced in the first line. Repeat this until you reach a filename that’s being referenced in the Mega Bezel Base CRT Presets Folder called MBZ_1_ADV_GDV.slangp.
This is your base CRT Shader Presets.
Since @Duimon’s presets and mine both use the same base preset family, you can replace the filename and path of the base preset in my shader preset with the name of whichever of his presets you would like to use.
Other than that there might be a couple other parameters to change so that everything matches up and behaves properly. @hgoda90 mentioned them in one of his posts above.
So basically what you would have is my Shader Preset passing through @Duimon’s and picking up and applying his bezels and settings on the way to the final base CRT preset instead of loading the base preset at the point where it was in my shader preset chain.
Using Duimon’s Graphics with Cyber presets is easy. Just change #reference line in Duimon Presets folder of any shader file to the Cyber shader location you want.
from #reference “…/…/…/…/…/shaders_slang/bezel/Mega_Bezel/Presets/Base_CRT_Presets/MBZ__3__STD__GDV.slangp” to #reference “…/…/…/…/…/shaders_slang/bezel/Mega_Bezel/Presets/Experimental/CyberLab/MBZ__1__Advance_Full_Reflections/1080p_Optimized_Presets/CyberLab__Composite-Sharp__1080p__PVM-Edition__ADV.slangp”
The problem with Tekken just set the aspect ratio to 4:3 and set Scanline Direction to Horizontal.
I should mention that I would just copy only the shaders you will use and place them in their own folder. Then change the reference lines and use those as your shaders.
Scanline Direction has to be Horizontal to fix the fuzzy image. The fuzzy image is made when a Cyber shader is used. With the default shader Scanline Direction isn’t needed to be changed
Edit: I did forget to mention that Orientation has to be Horizontal.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I’m glad you’re enjoying my shader presets! Expressions like these go a long way towards fueling my motivation to do even more and to do even better!
Yes, detailed tutorials/guides with screenshots and/or videos can go a long way in demystifying this stuff and making it even more accessible. I had a video tutorial up which covered the installation but it’s now outdated due to changes in the shader.
Time is quite limited these days and if I had to choose between making a video and improving my shader presets sadly most of the time I would choose the latter. These latest preset are a complete overhaul of what was there before so in the process things would have probably been broken in my 1080p and 1440p Optimized presets. I addressed the 1080p Optimized presets in my most recent update and 1440p should soon follow.
What resolution display are you running? 4K is where the real magic takes place! Remember to share these with others so that more may benefit.
Thanks a lot @Neofuuma! I try my best. This is just the first iteration of this complete overhaul of my classic presets (well almost complete since I deliberately left my RGB - Sharp preset untouched for anyone who still wants to hold onto the previous look).
Once I get my 1440p Optimized presets out of the way, it should just be about fine tuning. I also see that you’re hitting that magical 60fps with full reflections! Good things come to those who wait. I didn’t even expect to get such an improvement out of these after I was finished with my Computer Monitor presets. Now they’re already like old news but very important old news that helped me to reach to this point. I already have some ideas for what I want to do next so stay tuned, enjoy and remember to share this with others so they can benefit!
By the way, you might want to take a look at your Crop/Zoom settings. Did you take a bit too much off the top there?
That was with no playing around with any settings, so not sure what’s going on there I’ll have to take a peek.
Yes, even on the advanced preset, I was hitting 60 fps with most things I put at it. Even if I’m just on a 42" TV and at 1080, it’s still very nice looking.
Can’t wait to see how you want to improve on this shader, because it’s already so freaking good. I really do appreciate your work, so keep it going! I was constantly tinkering around with different shaders, trying to find just the right one with just the right setting, but this is it. I’m going to use this one for pretty much all of my systems that i got set up so far. Only thing that i’m still tinkering with are the bezels. I finally managed to change them as well, thanks to your instruction.
My Tekken aspect ration issue is solved as well btw, thanks. In terms of the brightness, i think i’ll just keep it as is. It’s only really an issue during daytime when the sun’s out. I’m playing on an LG C9 btw, so that is probably part of why i thought it was a little dim during the day. I agree, 4k is were the magic happens, but i tried the 1440p preset on my PC monitor and it looked pretty fantastic as well. Once i get a little more time on my hands i’ll probably gonna sit down and write a click-by-click tutorial on this.
I got another question relating to the Nintendo DS. Do you think there’s a way of making your shader work with it? I tried the side by side mode and it seems to scale the scanline grid to the scale of the small screen, so basically the scanlines and the whole CRT effect becomes less noticable. You see some of it, but sitting a little further away almost makes it appear as if no shader is activated. For some reason it works a little better using the top/down orientation, but that is making the screens to small for my liking. Did you ever fumble around with DS emulation by any chance and got some pointers on how to best go about using your shader with it? What core would be best to use and some general settings that might be important?
Every 2 - 4 weeks I say this myself then come out with a complete overhaul like this set. Previously it was my Computer Monitor presets and prior to that it was De’Ja’Vu with the presets that resemble my Current RGB-Sharp PVM Edition preset. It’s been a very hectic 6 months since.
Thank you very much for your support and taking your time to share such positive sentiments.
I’ve never emulated DS but some have had success mixing my older 1440p presets on 4K screen resolution for handhelds so you can try the 1440p RGB Sharp Preset. Other than that, that’s a challenge for the future and you can probably look into @Duimon’s excellent work on handheld shaders using LCD Shader Presets.
This is what you’ll see if you stick your nose up to the screen using my new and improved for 2022 CyberLab Composite - Sharp PVM Edition Shader Preset! Just zoom in and bask in the everglow of those RGB “phosphor” triads!
I’m going to be straightforward: I don’t like the new composite sharp pwm preset. It’s darker than previous preset, it’s “grainy” (especially on a big screen), and it just doesn’t look right.
In your preset those “phosphor triads” are basically squares, and with very large black empty spaces between them too. From a distance it looks like really low res early LCD screen (like a GBA screen or something).
Here is an example of extreme close-up on my Sony Trinitron CRT for comparison:
Again, I don’t mean to be rude. I tried your presets recently (after the post on emu reddit), and I was blown away. I think that this should be a new preset entirely. Your previous composite sharp pwm presets were perfect in my opinion.
And here are same screens I posted on reddit with your previous preset:
https://imgur.com/a/rOGHa2p (imgur album).
Sure, it doesn’t have those “triads”, but IMHO they look so much better and more “authenthic” from a distance. Again, here are a couple of pictures of my CRT from a viewing distance:
