Please show off what crt shaders can do!

Slot mask isn’t really that good on 1080p anyway, but if you insist using it. It’s technically way too rough and unrealistic low TVL with zoom for monitor size upwards. Mask 6 = 3 px. So 1080 /3 = 360 TVL = standard TV. Lower is possible, but it’s getting more unrealistic, the bigger your actual display is. On a phone, it makes a different impression, just like in real life with Mini TVs (in real life, these would be essentially scanline free from what I’ve seen).

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on my display (1080p 24’’) I can see weird patterns the image is not usable over here. I agree with @Jamirus, 1080p and slotmask is a troublesome pair…

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I think slot masks can work at 1080p, but you have to tamper down certain expectations. For one, curvature is probably a bit too hard to get looking good, as there’s not enough resolution to avoid moire. Overscaling is practically a must, too, as you want as much resolution as humanly possible, but of course this is a no-go with hi-res content, as that cuts off too much space. For masks, I personally find mask 9 is the best one to use, as it’s three-pixels wide and plays well with the slot mask parameters. And for scanlines, you really want them to be quite light. Make them too strong and pronounced, and you see a pattern where every other line looks different, which appears to be a side effect of the slot mask itself, and it’s just ugly.

Here’s about where I find the scanline strength to look quite good at 1080p. As you can see, they’re quite light and are almost invisible in places:

The most surefire way to get it looking alright is to use No Scanline mode. This replicates what many smaller, older sets look like, where there are no visible lines even with 240p, and as a bonus it’s a little brighter, but of course it ends up looking somewhat blurrier. The biggest upside to No Scanline Mode, though, is that it does not require integer scaling at all, so it can be freely used with hi-res 480p content without letterboxing. Also, I just found out not too long ago that the very earliest VGA monitors actually used slot masks like their CGA/EGA predecessors and showed no scanlines due to line-doubling on games, so a slot mask No Scanline Mode setup could work quite well for VGA DOS games as well.

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I tried hard to make slotmask and scanline gaps looking good at 1080p; and I agree with all of the previous posts.

In the end I even tried to draft unexisting masks that give a similar feeling when viewed at distance or weird things like making phosphor height = scanlines height.

Btw, following the canonical path, I’ve found that in addition to previous suggestions, you can avoid weird patterns with and without curvature by using use wider phosphors or shorter phosphors; the latter is better imho.

This is a good example from @DariusG that looks convincing from near and far:

@sonkun should have a bit of experience in that regard too :slight_smile:

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It can be done and looks very convincing, lottes mask 1 has already done it. It looks very close to the real thing as long as you dont look 2 cm from screen looking for the slot mask. crt-geom scanlines code in crt-cyclon (that is running in screenshots) helps to avoid moire. But in reality in CRT there is very little curvature, bezel is curved but the end image is nearly flat. At 1440p if we do the math it’s 480 TVL, 360 TVL is not that bad either, it looks like a normal TV. If we want to be more accurate we should lower scanlines strength too, 480 TVL has stronger scanlines certainly.

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Why don’t you try Mask 6, which is 3 pixels wide in an RGB Subpixel pattern?

The Mask size would have to be 1.

The Slot Mask Width would match the number of Subpixels across the mask is so 3 or Auto.

Then set a height suitable for 1080p. I’m not sure off hand since I last did this a very long time ago.

After that, adjust your GSL Scanlines type and scaling settimgs to what you would looks right and you’re good to go.

Don’t touch Mask Zoom.

For testing on a 4K screen, disable scaling in your GPU driver and set your desktop resolution to 1080p.

That should turn your 4K display into a smaller 1080p subpixel accurate display temporarily.

Unlike what @Jamirus said above. I adore ~360 TVL masks of any kind. You just have to know how close or how far to sit from the screen but at 1080p, “beggars can’t be choosers.”

(And I can say that without putting down any 1080p screen users out there because I have a few 1080p displays which I love and have tried to make the most of.)

Aperture Grille doesn’t really lose much at 1080p though.

For 1440p you can use Mask 10, width 5, set height to suit. I’m bound to have some examples of that 1080p Slot Mask in action. Will update as soon as I can find it.

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Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to say that masks resulting in 360 TVL are bad, I just meant to say that 3pix masks like 6 already provide you that on 1080p, and you end up making the mask rougher if you use the zoom option, with a zoom of 3 to an absurd degree. Again, phones tend to complicate things here a bit, not only because of their small screens, they also tend to offer a lot of brightness that you don’t necessarly have on older computer (sdr) screens.

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Speaking of 1080p and slotmasks, I updated my overmask aperturegrille and slotmask presets in the main repo. If you look at the shots, (in the darker one is more evident), you can see that the slotmask is nowhere accurate, but still from a normal view distance it gives similar vibe-
You’ve to be a bit creative when dealing with curvature,slotmasks and scanline gaps at 1080p :slight_smile:

Monitor-Screen_Hmask-Core_SlotMask-Overmask.slangp

The following are without overmask (staggering is due to moire mitigation needed by overmasking)

Monitor-Screen_Hmask-Aperturegrille-Overmask.slangp

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Soon as I see the word moire it’s enough to send shivers down my spine lol. The best things I’ve found to fight against it especially when using masks at 100 percent with the guest shader is deconvergence (especially that green one), tweaking the scanline gamma setting and the contrast setting in the negative values within the grade shader. It doesn’t eliminate it completely but it has helped to reduce it by more than I could ask for.

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“MAME” preset in folder presets/crt-cyclon (GLSL)

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This is Monitor-New_aperturegrille_gm.slangp with FXAA and unsharp mask (glow sharpness to -1)

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Do you guys think that psp games look good like this?

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Higher gamma out by about 0.2 maybe?

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Just showing off what CRT Shaders can do in 2023.

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Hi can you tell me your settings please

I was using the ppsspp standalone emulator on android because vulkan won’t work anymore for me in retroarch.

I was using

-ssaa gauss

-bloom(half the values)

-dot psp color(mobile)

-simple sharpen (sharpen to your liking)

rendering resolution 1

These custom shaders where all found in a ppsspp forum thread. There is also a 2xres crt shader which looks nice(for 2x rendering)

At 1x rendering resolution, CRT shaders should just work normal, in this case you’re combining a LCD shader with effects like bloom, which I personally don’t really like. It doesn’t look bad to me for the 3D graphics, but the 2D elements (e.g. blurred fonts) are something of a sensitive subject for me. Ofc this depends on your own display and the look you’re striving for. Higher rendering resolution complicates things for both CRT and LCD shaders though, especially when it’s not possible to scale a lot (e.g. rendering res x2 scaled x2 to 1920x1088)

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Yeah you are right the 2d elements would look better if they are sharper. I just wanted to see if I can get away all the jaggies with 1x rendering :sweat_smile: sadly there aren’t as many options in the standalone ppsspp emulator like with retroarch. Lcd3x didn’t play nicely with ssaa and zfast lcd looked even softer.

It looks sharper on the screen itself than in the screenhots though

This is with really strong lcd3x settings but it needs such a bright display to look good. Compression makes the screenshots worse

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That definitely looks very dark with the laptop I’m currently viewing it, but I’m guessing you are using a phone or tablet where you can pump up brightness a lot.