Hello! I’ve been using RetroArch and the Beetle PSX HW core for quite a while but I’m having a problem with slang shaders. Basically I’m interested in only two shaders, the xBRZ and the anti-aliasing shaders. The first one causes RA to crash if loaded from the Quick Menu when a game is running, just any preset of it (4x, 5x, freescale…). If I load the core and load the shader before starting a game, then it will load successfully and I can see its options displayed (filter, scale) but RA would crash as soon as I start a game. The anti-aliasing shader instead works just fine in game, but only the aa-shader-4.0.slangp preset, the level2 one does the same as xBRZ (not interested in the other aa presets). Is there some option I have to tweak to prevent the xBRZ shader from crashing RA? Using RA 1.7.3 x64 on Windows 10 with the latest Beetle core, vulkan driver, updated the shader presets from the Online Updater, re-downloaded and unzipped RA twice.
We would need a log to know for sure, but I suspect you’re using a high internal resolution and then the shader is multiplying that already-high resolution and that’s causing it to exceed your GPU’s max framebuffer resolution.
If you’re trying to use xBR/Z to filter static backgrounds (e.g., the pre-rendered stuff on Final Fantasy / Resident Evil), try the super-xbr-3d presets instead, which will ignore the 3D parts and only filter the backgrounds. If you’re trying to filter the 3D models’ textures, that’s not available for the Vulkan renderer currently.
Mmmh I think you are definitely right, I’m rendering the games at 8x resolution. I didn’t know the xBRZ shader was so demanding! And yes I was trying to filter 3D games, Spyro and Harry Potter. I guess my GTX 970 can’t handle that much and at this point it seems it isn’t even worth doing.
I experimented a little more. You said texture filtering isn’t available for vulkan (now I understand why the core option didn’t seem to change anything…) so I switched to GL driver and noticed games actually look much better using the 3-point filter from the core options that gives them a N64-ish look (which in my opinion is still way better than the PS1’s pixelated textures) rather than the xBRZ shader. This also left the shader slot open for the anti-aliasing shader.
It’d be nice to have texture filtering on vulkan though, I’ll wait for updates. The pgxp options seem to perform worse on GL than they do on vulkan.
Thank you very much for the quick reply 
Yeah, 3-point bilinear has a cool look on PS1 games
I finally got a laptop that supports vulkan, so I’m hoping to start working on adding texture filtering to the vulkan renderer soon.