Shader Challenge: composite video on a PVM

[Cyber]

@Nesguy

It’s not bright enough, but when I crank up the bright boosts the sharpness of the white text goes to hell.

@Nesguy

I really don’t like the bloom haze over highlights,

Me neither.

@Nesguy

a necessary trade off if you want the image to be bright enough.

Exactly, plus the bloom control pumps up the colour volume a bit in a very pleasing manner.

You can probably take a look at @RetroGames4K 's presets and screenshots. I haven’t noticed any (much?) bloom haze in (much of?) his work, however he might have started off on the accurate path but has drifted toward the smooth, soft path over time. I’m sure he uses different tweaks in order to get his brightness to an acceptable level.

At this point we know what needs to be done in order to get things bright enough without bloom and that is the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor (as well as your) brute force Flat Panel TV brightness approach which makes for some ugly screenshots and great inconvenience if using the display for multiple tasks.

We must also always consider viewing distance when putting so much effort into these things. From a distance many of these so called “deal breakers” don’t really matter, especially when you’re fully immersed by the story, gameplay, music and graphics while playing your favourite games. In other words when you’re having fun.

@Nesguy

The PVM is a lot trickier.

I think the PVM photo is kinda not so much reference quality as well.

Take a look at these zoomed in.

RetroGames4K's Mega Bezel and other shaders screen pics & gameplays

Welcome to RetroGames4K’s thread. Here I will post every screenshot and gameplays from Mega Bezel and other Retroarch’s shaders. My main objective is to post screenshots from my custom settings and hope you enjoy it.

[Nesguy]

@Cyber

Exactly, plus the bloom control pumps up the colour volume a bit in a very pleasing manner.

I’ve found that raising bloom by a single notch (0.05) brightens up the image without having too noticeable an effect on the phosphors. Anything higher and they start to wash out in a bad way and you lose phosphor detail. At very high levels the subpixels become downright ugly.

@Cyber

We must also always consider viewing distance

Definitely. I’m judging my presets based on a viewing distance of 2-3 ft from my desktop monitor. Under such conditions, a higher degree of precision is required.

@Cyber

Take a look at these zoomed in.

Those are nice, aside from the (IMO) excessive bloom.

[Nesguy]

Told myself I wouldn’t do this, yet here I am again, obsessively tweaking.

I edited the parameter range for “sharpen strength” in custom fast sharpen so I could crank it up to 10.00.

Thoughts?

[hunterk]

Shaders. Not even once.

It’s sharp alright, but I can see some ringing/oversharpening. Nothing terrible, though.

[Nesguy]

I believe something similar is happening on the PVM, although I’ve probably gone a bit overboard.

I think an expanded parameter range could be helpful with some setups. @guest.r

[Cyber]

@Nesguy

I think an expanded parameter range could be helpful with some setups.

Many of the parameters can go beyond the ranges listed in the menu if entered manually in the shader preset file.

@Nesguy

Told myself I wouldn’t do this, yet here I am again, obsessively tweaking.

Don’t do it, it’s more than good enough. For me, what’s probably most important is everything being in focus from my viewing position, other than that, I just do this for fun and for the artistic thrills (basically the same feelings that I get when I look at anything visual that I like).

I tend to love a challenge but one that’s worthy of my time and effort. I really wouldn’t want to get to the point where I can’t enjoy playing a game if it’s a little different from the way it looks on the reference standard medium.

I’m not saying that this is you but just warning based on what I’ve read and observed. This niche is filled with perfectionists and obsessive compulsives but we shouldn’t only be sowing the seeds for others’ benefits but also enjoying the fruits of our labour as well.

I think the key to it is being able to accept. To accept and appreciate wherever you are on this journey. Sometimes, what’s needed is not necessarily more or better tools but also more time to master and try different ways of using these tools. We must also accept that the tools themselves will always have certain limitations including the hardware used to display the final output of our labour.

We can also choose to celebrate how far or rather how close we have come, rather than focus on that last 1% which might always continue to elude us.

Our time is short as well as ultimately unknown. Hopefully we’ll at least get to play and possibly complete the majority of games that we would like to in our lifetime.

@Nesguy

Thoughts?

So for me this is quite satisfactory. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t experiment some more if I were you but I would definitely enjoy playing on my creation until the next tweak comes along.

[Jamirus]

I took a couple of shots of a screen with NTSC-Adaptive only on both LCD monitor and CRT. None of the SMB shots on the CRT came out satisfactory under present conditions, I used the Streets of Rage 2 screenshot below. Adaptive settings default, except I set to phase 3 (I forgot which is supposed to be used when, but in this case, I didn’t want to have the annoying flicker which you’ll get by default in this example).

Screenshot if you want work with it:

CRT:

Monitor: