I’m just curious your reference point is. I see most everything on a lcd 4k lenovo yoga laptop. I don’t get much of a chance to hook it up to my oled LG.
I don’t have access to 4K, all the displays I’ve used recently are 1080p. Whatever display I’m using, I usually max out the backlight when doing CRT emulation.
Reference for point a good emulation tv?
Just wanted to be sure we using similar modern TV technology to look at these screenshots. I’m curious if the new HDMI 2.1 in the 3000 gpu’s will make things look better when outputting LG Oleds.
you can get lower latency with 120hz @ 4K.
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Yeah, if anything 4K will just make everything look better. I still like 1080p because 1080p displays are cheap and so is the hardware needed to run shaders at 1080p.
One thing to be aware of: at 4K you need to use different subpixel masks than those used for 1080p if you want to keep the TVL low. I think they’re all in the shader mega-function. There are comments explaining which masks work best at various resolutions, it’s pretty handy.
@Nesguy Yes. I’ve found I like masks much more in 4k vs 1080. The subtle fidelity of them holds up better. I like when shaders having scaling for them. While not physically correct sometimes a mask looks better just a little bit smaller or larger depending on the 4k resolution and screen size.
I wanted to see if I could push the venom shader closer to the blurry dot mess or Royale. Here is my current attempt with Shadow Dancer or the Genesis. (I’m using Nesguy’s suggest 0 or 7 on mask type, In this case 7.)
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Looks awesome Boom. So you where talking about that when you said blurry dot mess lol, I thought you were talking about how the bloom looked originally.
Yeah I really prefer the mask in the GDV shot to the one in the Royale shot if we’re talking about actually playing a game; that Royale mask only looks good in screenshots IMO. Did you already check contrast, black level etc?
Also, why 1313 pixels for the horizontal resolution instead of 1494?
The gdv shot looks alot more natural/organic in comparison to the royale shot imho.
@Nesguy It’s a crop down from roughly 3840x2160. Resizing such fine details either after taking a screen shot or as thumbnails doesn’t display how I’m seeing it. The contrast and blacks could be improved if I killed the glow or nudged the gamma one way or another. Nothing is being harshly clipped on either end. I tried to maximize how big and small the scanlines could get so the whole thing is probably a little too much.
Here is an interesting crop from Defender from my adjusted Venom and a near default one. Crazy the different shapes you can get with the same shader.
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First shot is 100% fire!
Boom, if I send you a shader later this week will you check it out?
For sure. I would love to see what you have been cooking.
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Looks great, but I think you’re right that the beam width variation might be a little too much. Also not a huge fan of that glow, but looks great otherwise.
I don’t think glow ever really looks right, you’re trying to capture something that’s 3D on a 2D surface, much like curvature. It just looks really artificial and is very immersion-breaking for me, personally.
@BendBombBoom inspired me.
Here’s a 1080p aperture grille setup that I just whipped up, using the same settings as my previous shot but substituting mask 7 for GDV slotmask. It’s impossible to even see the aperture grille at correct viewing distances but I guess that’s the point? It’s 540 TVL based on the number of phosphors. I think maybe it needs a bit more contrast.
Edit: and I forgot to correct the color temperature again 
(adjust backlight to 100%, view at original size)
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Those are very good. I actually see the grill, and just like @Syh, definitely prefer “masked” presets. Plain scanlines looks barren and more artificial too.
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Oooh! 
I like this one!!
Could you share your settings? 
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If you can see the grille then you’re sitting close enough to see individual LCD pixels, which IMO is too close for retro gaming, especially when using shaders. I think a lot of shader effects look more natural when you sit a bit further back.
I’ve become pretty partial to the BW masks that only try to emulate the black space between phosphor triads. They preserve brightness and contrast better than the phosphor-emulating masks while still conveying the texture of the mask, and you don’t have to worry about subpixel stuff.
There’s a definite green tint when using the BW aperture grille, not sure why. It’s only apparent when viewing the images at original size on a 1080p display, could be something display-specific. Need to check these out on another display.
BW aperture grille, 100%
BW slotmask, 100%
No mask, no bloom, double scanline strength
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