Have you guys tried the GDV-MINI versions?
These are the fastest crt shaders integrated in the package.
Let me know how the performance works for you on those versions
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STD_GDV-MINI runs at 100fps on my gtx-1050 without a problem (1440p) Just want to run the shader on a light system, like a high-end TV box or future SoC boards. I kinda miss the days when CRT-Royle was considered most demanding lol cause Royle runs at 400+ fps on the same system.
EDIT: I just remembered why I don’t use Mega Bezel shader more often… I can’t stand the GPU fan noise when I use the shader for longer playing sessions 
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Something like this would be great for more demanding cores (DC/n64/Saturn) on potato systems.
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Yeah, I think I’ve been through them all. At lower resolutions they play full speed, it’s just that I would rather not do resolution switching down to 1080p because it gives me a bunch of new problems… : )
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Yeah, I hear you, although the final res you are at is going to affect performance a lot since the reflection has to be calculated at final res.
I’m not sure how much faster this can be, it’s really the full res passes which eat the performance, a faster crt shader might be slightly faster, but I’m not sure if there would be much of a difference from what GDV-MINI does.
GDV-MINI actually has 1 pass at final res, vs Guest-Advanced-Fastest which has 4 passes, with 2 at final res. GDV-MINI probably also has about 1/2 of the code compared to guest-advanced-fastest, so I’m not sure it would be any faster than GDV-MINI
It might be possible to do a potato-reflect would be limited to the potato features but add reflection.
I did some tests and you could get a potato reflect with no generated bezel in 20 passes at about a 50% increase in performance {660fps vs 450fps on a rtx2060) , and a potato with the generated bezel at about a 30% performance increase (580fps vs 450fps on a rtx2060).
But without an automatically generated bezel you have all the problems of trying to match the scaling of the background graphic exactly which is why I took @Syh’s excellent challenge to create a generated bezel.
EDIT, I messed up my words before, this should be more clear:
GDV-MINI actually has only 1 pass, and that pass is at final res vs Guest-Advanced-Fastest which has 4 passes, with 2 at final res. GDV-MINI probably also has about 1/2 of the code compared to guest-advanced-fastest, so I’m not sure it would be any faster than GDV-MINI
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Up till now I’ve been testing out my RA setup (with the Mega Bezel) on a 1080p LCD TV. I moved the box to a different TV which is 4K and ended up with some interesting observations.
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Even when I forced Windows resolution to 1080p, everything ran more slowly with Mega Bezel loaded while connected to the 4K tv, even with “game mode” on. I don’t just mean in-game, but also in the RA menus. Less responsiveness overall, lagging input, etc. Windows and RA reported that the TV has a 60hz refresh rate, so that wasn’t the issue. As a result of the slowness, I elected to turn the Mega Bezel off (sadly). I figured that setting Windows resolution to 1080p would basically make the experience identical to when I was connected to the 1080p TV in the other room, but for whatever reason, this didn’t seem to be the case.
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My controller had more lag while the box was connected to the 4K tv (with and without the Mega Bezel). Obviously this has nothing to do with the Mega Bezel or any shader. The controller is an SN30 Pro, Bluetooth. Connecting it via USB cable eliminated the lag. What’s strange is that the lag is not present with the other TV. Baffling. Will probably “resolve” this issue by just switching from BT controllers to 2.4ghz USB dongle controllers.
Weird stuff, but hey, that’s an emulation box for ya…
EDIT: did some more testing this morning - changed the core overrides to just use other shaders and an overlay, then moved the box to the 4K tv again. issue #2 is gone. full responsiveness in-game and in-menu without any use of Mega Bezel. I wonder if what really happened was that Mega Bezel attempted to run at 4k resolution last night before I’d made the windows resolution change – resulting in boosting the thermals, then in throttling of the whole system. Maybe that, in turn, caused all the menu slowdown and bluetooth input lag.
I’d still love to use the Mega Bezel, so I’m going to do some more tests later in the week with a different Dp-HDMI adapter which is limited to 1080p/60hz output, which will mean that windows cannot automatically adjust the resolution (beyond 1080p) when swapping between screens.
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In your testing try turning on the resolution debug text which is the first parameter in the list, this will print what the final resolution the shader is running at, this is called Viewport Res.
I mention this because I’ve had Retroarch running at a different resolution than I was expecting before – it was running at a different resolution than the desktop resolution – and this is a good way to see if this is happening.
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I’ll do that next time I have the box hooked up to the 4k tv upstairs. I thought there could have been some sort of resolution-related issue(s) contributing to all of it (including the perceived input lag). If RA and windows are not on the same page, and then the shader is in the mix also, I could see things going sideways.
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In progress shots of the Mega Bezel with the Megatron integrated, sdr version. The global graphics brightness is set to 40% to be a better brightness with the full mask that the Megatron uses. These sdr presets are meant to be used on a monitor which has a high-ish brightness and increase the monitor brightness to compensate for the mask.
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Thats looking awesome @HyperspaceMadness I can’t wait to get my hands on this to try it out! I think I’ve said before that many SDR laptop screens go very bright even though they don’t have HDR capabilities.
HDR is a weird thing in that respect as my 2018/19 Dell XPS laptop doesn’t have HDR support but does have ‘HDR playback’ support as in you can’t play HDR games or have a HDR Windows desktop but you can playback HDR videos. I’m not quite sure what the difference is but the display gets very bright when plugged in so who cares! 
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I playback HDR video files on my non HDR TV. I just manually created a calibration profile that has everything looking relatively normal.
Remember many displays were more than bright enough long before HDR became a standard and the likes of Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG came along.
So you can still achieve quite a bit with SDR displays.
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Are regular IPS monitors to be benefited from the SDR preset?
Thank you
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Yes it will put the Sony Megatron into the right colour space for normal SDR IPS monitors. You can tweak brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma to your heart’s content after setting the shader into SDR mode.
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I don’t know, apart from laptop displays (that the manufacturers thought might be used outside) I’m not so sure there were many displays outside of professional monitors that got that bright. Generally the very bright SDR displays (bright enough for proper masks) are HDR capable - HDR became ‘mainstream’ around 2015.
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Yeah, looking forward to seeing what you think 
. My Github is updated (link in first post) if you want to grab it from there, though I will release it as a package pretty soon.
Thanks for your contribution to the community & retrogaming with this great shader!
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Oh wow! I will as soon as I have a chance to get on my PC although that’s probably going to be Tuesday or later. What repository is it in btw?
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I’ll be up front they don’t look very much like an actual CRT when you add that glass smooth BUT I am glad you’ve found something you like and I do think they look amazing in a stylized CRT way. I’ll have to have a go and see what they look like in person - I’ve got a very dull CRT that this may brighten up the image for.
EDIT: Maybe what I’m looking at is upscaling/downscaling rather than the glass smooth as you’re grabbing it off a 1200p monitor.
It’s this one:
You need to put the Mega_Bezel folder/repo in the shaders_slang/bezel folder
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One thing to note about the integration with the Mega Bezel, all the normal curvature methods are available, but by default the crt curvature scale multiplier (HSM_CRT_CURVATURE_SCALE) is set to 0 to remove curvature to avoid Moire.
Set this to 100 to get the curvature which matches the main curvature. Be warned though, if you are at 1080p this will cause some ugly Moire – that’s why it’s set to 0 by default – but I think at 4K it will probably be ok
HSM_CRT_CURVATURE_SCALE = 0
HSM_CRT_CURVATURE_SCALE = 100
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Yes so obviously I cant stop anybody adding curvature or blurs, blooms, smooths or anything else they want (and nor should I). I’d just say it’s not in the spirit of the Megatron shader.
Curvature is maybe the outlier there as it is something I’ve been thinking about. The thing I’m thinking is to implement curvature in a way that is hopefully closer to a CRT - although you can never really get there at least not with resolutions close todays resolutions or without something like VR.
The big thing I’d look to resolve is why we’re getting moire if we use curvature. If you look at an actual CRT that are all curved we obviously don’t get moire.
You could argue it’s to do with the use of discrete pixels and maybe its a contributing factor but I’m thinking it’s maybe more to do with the way these shaders are implementing curvature.
Blurring the hell out of the image to overcome moire is not something I think is a good solution that I’ve seen some threads argue.
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