NVIDIA Shield TV Enhancement problems

RetroArch Android devices
#1

I’ve done some searches here and haven’t been able to find anything. I am having some issues with running internal resolution scaling and shaders at the same time within Duckstation on an NVIDIA Shield TV. I can run shaders and they work fine. Or I can increase internal resolution, with mixed results. Using OpenGL resolution scaling works at 720p, but at 1080p the main overlay of the game goes away and I only get whatever background image is on the screen. Using Vulkan I can scale to 1080p but when I do that shaders no longer work. I can load shaders and I can change shaders, but they don’t apply any visual effect whatsoever. In OpenGL I also could not apply both even at 720. Often times I caused the application to crash playing with various settings.

I haven’t dived too deep into this: Checking to see if it works on my PC, etc. I keep all my retroarch config files and my games on a shared drive on my NAS (Another interesting topic for another day) that 2 Shield TVs and my PCs use so I can bounce around the house. Not sure if that’s relevant, but seemed mentionable.

An insights into what might be causing this would be appreciated.

#2

Shaders are programs that the GPU runs on each pixel it draws. So, if you increase the internal res, that means the shader has to run on that many more pixels each frame. So, if you have a shader that runs pretty fast–let’s say 150 fps–at 240p, you’re running it on ~9x as many pixels at 720p, so 150/9 means you’re probably going to get about 20-25 fps (being generous) out of that shader. Likewise, many multipass shaders run some of the passes at higher res for whatever reason (more detail, etc.), so if the pass is 3x normal scale, if you’ve increased the internal res to 720p, it’s tripling that (i.e., ~4K), and this can often result in your GPU just giving up and crashing the program.

Aside from that, you mentioned that the ones that don’t crash don’t seem to do anything, which is because most of the shaders are designed around the assumption of low resolution. For shaders like scalefx and xBR, which rely on analyzing pixels to detect patterns, increased res breaks their ability to see those patterns (unless the shader compensates for the scaling, like the super-*xbr-3d shaders). For (most) CRT shaders, the scanline effect scales up with the increased res, making them essentially just disappear, and the blurring happens on such a small scale that it disappears as well.

There are, however, some shaders that work with and are intended for high-res content, like the cel shaded effects, anti-aliasing effects, FSR and the aforementioned super-*xbr-3d shaders.

1 Like
#3

I appreciate both your feedback and how fast you came in like a hawk! Thank you.

I had read something along those lines before. To clarify, just raising the resolution caused unpredictability with the Shield TV. It’s not consistent though. If it decided it wants to run at 1080p it can, no problem. It just might crash a time or two before it decides it’s ok. After it’s ok, no problem. Play all day. After it’s at HQ, most of the shaders will say they apply without issues. Only a select few crash the system, but I was trying a lot of them.

I’m hoping you can elaborate on blurring happening at such a small scale it disappears. Like completely never existed disappears? Or it’s just not as big a boon because you’ve got so many more pixels? Because I don’t mean that the difference is minimal. I mean that it’s literally the exact same image, pixel for pixel. (At least I could never see a pixel change while looking around at different areas of the image before and after turning it on/off)

I hopped down to my desktop to play around because I figured with it being more powerful and Windows being more common that I could try more things in a shorter amount of time with less crashing. I turned everything to vulkan to do a like to like. I also put the scaling to 3x for 720, again to minimize any performance issues I might face regardless of my system being pretty beefy. I found that 90+% of the shaders don’t touch the image in any way. Interestingly, of the shaders that you mentioned for higher res, the anti-aliasing shaders were the ones I wanted to use the most, but did not effect the image in any way. The super-*xbr-3d shaders also all did nothing. Those that I saw that worked were the film overlay, some of the super blurry ones, bloom, cel, and a CRT effect.

This takes more time to fiddle with than I had thought it would. So sadly my rummagings are limited to the one game that I want to play most (Xenogears). And the core than ran it with the lease complaints (Duckstation).

#4

Did anyone else notice something strange with the latest 1.9.12 version on Nvidia shield(latest firmware)? When it is freshly installed it is not blue anymore, it is gray, and at the bottom it says “No core”, a lot of items are missing from the menus and the keypads are not detected automaticly anymore (error: wireless controller not configured fallback)

20211113_143417
20211113_1434174032×3024 2.47 MB

#5

The gray ozone menu is the default menu now instead of the older, blue xmb menu, so no surprise there. It’s also not unusual for it to say “no core” in the lower-left corner.

For the missing menu items, maybe you need to go to settings > user interface > show advanced settings ON?

1 Like