Please show off what crt shaders can do!

[DevilSingh]

I know it looks dark, I just set my monitor (max 300 nits btw) to 100% brightness when I use my shaders to play games. And turning up the brightness in the shader bleaches out the colors and causes nasty moire because of the minor amount of curvature I have to use to even get horizontal lines. Which if don’t use just gives me the aperture grille and no scanlines.

Also, I find it kinda funny that you think it looks dark, as it was your own posts earlier here that made me fall in love with darker masks & scanlines.

[sonkun]

I do agree that you’ll get different results on different displays. Those settings I used were on a basic 4k tv with all settings at default, picture mode on normal. Someone may load up that shader with their tv picture settings on “cool” mode and get a whole different vision. So what would you tweak to make it look better? I refuse to mess with my tv settings or backlights because that will become tiresome after a while going back and forth changing settings when I finish gaming. I’m just trying to keep things simple while making an all purpose shader that looks just good enough and passable, doesnt have to be 100 percent authentic looking to a T. But I’m curious as to how you would tweak my shader presets. Mind you I only like using masks 5 and 6, don’t care for the others or trying to make a pvm/bvm look.

[Nesguy]

Oh I definitely think that the mask should be as dark as possible while maintaining an adequately bright image, and you’re right that trying to make the image brighter through the shader compromises the image quality. The ideal is for the mask to be at 100% strength, but most displays will struggle to maintain adequate brightness at this level and so the mask strength has to come down a bit. I don’t know how those settings look on your display but I’m viewing them on a fairly bright Samsung LED TV with the backlight maxed out and brightness seems a bit lacking (IMO!).

For 480i content, have you considered using the interlacing simulation from crt-geom? Might be brighter and would also be more accurate, and that way you wouldn’t need the curvature or horizontal lines.

[Nesguy]

Really tough to say what should be tweaked without seeing it in person, particularly since I’m doing weird stuff with this display and you’re using a preset picture mode.

Colors seem oversaturated and gamma seems off (too dark), but as you said you’re using these settings on a preset picture mode on your TV so it probably (definitely) looks vastly different in person. I’d just fire up Fudoh’s 240p test suite to make sure everything looks good on your display.

That mask would certainly benefit from a higher resolution and is too coarse at 1080p- I’m curious, why aren’t you using a 4k resolution? Slotmask really wants 4k and up. If you’re not a fan of aperture grille displays then you can get a very decent dotmask effect at 1080p with the magenta-green checkerboard pattern (see above).

edit: Also, have you thought about making two picture modes that you can easily flip between? On my TV I have one mode calibrated exclusively for using Retroarch with the backlight maxed out and a custom color space. It’s very easy to just switch picture modes using the remote when I’m not using RA. CRT phosphor emulation really benefits from increased brightness, so it’s something worth considering.

[DevilSingh]

The thing is that the mask is not even at 100% in those pics. Both the mask and scanlines are close to 80% mark. Since the ReShade CRT shader is basically CRT-Geom with some changes, these are the values I use 0.8 for the mask and 0.2 for the scanlines. If I set those values to 0.7 and 0.3 respectively the image is more brighter at 50% brightness than the pics above at 100% brightness. But this causes the mask and scanlines to be too light/faint for my liking. So, even though its darker I’m happy with it.

About interlacing. Yes I tried CRT-Geom and I was happy with the look of it. But interlacing was causing burn-in on my LCD panel and I had to use the built-in tool in my monitor every time to fix it.

[DevilSingh]

Some more PCSX2 pics (These will be the last ones, I promise!)

Although it doesn’t look as good as I would like in 2D sprite based games. I think it looks better than static scanlines on interlaced games which cause line doubling on horizontal axis.

My settings (540p horizontal res) :

240p horizontal res :

(Oh, how I wish I could get this much curvature in my settings without moire ruining it!)

(Bonus) Tactics Ogre on PPSSPP :

P.S. Hope I don’t get banned for this!

[Syh]

You may try decreasing the scanline and mask strength some, it will decrease the moire some. From my experience the scanline strength had more to do with the moire then the mask does.

[DevilSingh]

As I discussed earlier in this thread with @Nesguy I’m not a fan of light scanlines. With how thin the scanlines are in my preset they are hard to see if I increase scalines weight anything past (0.2).

[Nesguy]

Have you checked out the interlacing options in guest-dr-venom? There are three different interlacing modes and you can set the trigger resolution to whatever you want (default is 400 lines). You might have better luck with those.

240p stuff and older content generally benefits from a bit of blur, IMO. A one size-fits-all shader is tough to pull off. You might consider making a couple different presets for different types/eras of content. It’s really easy to flip between shaders in-game by using “m” and “n” on the keyboard. I understand the appeal of having one all-purpose shader, though, especially if you plan on running RA in kiosk mode.

[Syh]

I think it actually only has 2 interlacing modes, as mode 0 is (standard) scanlines, mode 1 is standard interlacing with the jitter/flicker, mode 2 is is no flicker interlacing, and mode 3 is a no-scanline (no interlacing) mode.

[DevilSingh]

The SFIII 3rd Strike pics in my post are from PS2 version of the game running on PCSX2, not the arcade version running in RetroArch. The first pic is with the ReShade settings I use with PCSX2 and Dolphin, the second pic is just there to show the line doubling caused by static scanlines on interlaced games.

(I apologize for any confusion those pics may have caused.)

As for when I play 224p/240p games in RetroArch I use CRT-Royale-Kurozumi. And for PS1/Dreamcast games I have already been using Guest-Dr-Venom with interlacing mode set at 2 (smoothing) for the past few days and I like it a lot. I wish CRT-Geom had interlace smoothing or TATE from Guest-Dr-Venom, so I could port them to my ReShade CRT shader.

[DevilSingh]

I been using the slang preset @guest.r himself posted here. And imho it’s the best I have seen for 3D games.

[Mickevincent]

Same preset, different game

I will never play old games in high res and without a crt shader anymore!

[Nesguy]

Just playing around with some different blur settings in guest-dr-venom. Sometimes text and other details really look better with a certain amount of blur and it seems almost certain that the artist intended for these effects to be blurred.

Apologies if these shots appear too dark on your display- the mask strength is at 90% and I’m maxing out my display backlight while using a fairly bright display. Also, I’m not showing my full chain with color management or NTSC stuff, just the guest-dr-venom preset with custom settings.

Edit: after playing around some more it seems that subtractive sharpness can result in some unwanted artifacts in some situations. Mdapt and gdapt aren’t perfect, either. So, now I just have two presets, one with h_sharp at 1.50 and another with h_sharp at 4.00, and just go with one or the other depending on the game and pixel art. However, now I’m starting to question just how much composite video artifacts were even a thing back in the SNES/Genesis era, but I’ll save that for another post.

Horizontal sharpness at 1.50, subtractive sharpness 1.00:

Horizontal sharpness at 1.50, subtractive sharpness 0.50:

Horizontal sharpness at 1.50, subtractive sharpness at 0.00. The waterfall is blended properly. The resulting image is blurry as hell, though. It’s a trade-off.

Horizontal sharpness at 5.00, pretty much indistinguishable from nearest neighbor. The text doesn’t look great.

Horizontal sharpness at 4.00:

Horizontal sharpness at 1.50. The text looks a lot better but the image is very blurry and black lines in particular lack sharpness.

Horizontal sharpness at 1.50 and subtractive sharpness at 1.00. Text looks better and black lines are still sharp. Dithering isn’t blended (not seen in the example), so I’m considering adding mdapt or gdapt to the chain.

[DevilSingh]

Going through the thread again I just noticed that in my post #1419 I brain farted and typed HORIZONTAL (in all instances) when I meant VERTICAL like an idiot!

Well, English is not my native language! So there’s that.

[Syh]

You can go back an edit your post, lol.

Just thought I’d let you know.

[sonkun]

I see, so this is your vision with the guest shader. It looks like you’re going for the pvm look. Mind posting up your preset? Wanna try it out on my tv just to see how it looks.

[DevilSingh]

That’s what I wanted to do at first. But looks like you can’t edit a post after some time (maybe like a day?) has passed.

[Syh]

I think it may have to do with your account, I’m not sure. I think some things are tied to how much you posted and likes given and received.

[Mickevincent]

As much as I like anti aliasing in new games, as much do I disslike it in old games. It seems … hehe