It’s an LG GX OLED TV so the same RWBG Subpixel Layout as all other 4K LG OLED displays.
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Thank you for the advice, I tried all combinations, but the changing (I tried all possible variations) only alters the hue of the colors. It does not move the two blue rows one pixel to the right, to eliminate the overlapping.
I only know, that after the three (red, green and blue) rows, there is a black row at the end. Maybe the space is just too tight for this specific 8K/ 800 TVL layout. I mean, maybe the single pixel black line / row after RGB can be replaced by blue, so there is enough space to eliminate the overlapping of green and blue.
It’s a bit hard to describe, but I hope you know what I mean 
And by the way, I am about to order a Notebook panel controller board and two of the finest Notebook displays available on the market.
One OLED 15.6 inch panel with 440 nits of full field white brightness (HDR around 600 nits) and a 15.6 inch Mini-LED LCD panel with around 1000 nits of brightness too.
Both 3840x2160 resolution:
With the controller board it is possible to power the displays without a Notebook. And these two displays should be the best on the market at the moment with OLED and LCD Mini-LED technology.
I am very curious how nice the shader will look on these small displays in comparison to my big 55 inch OLED TV. I guess it will be very hard to see individual subpixels, as the PPI is very high.
And another good thing is, that the bare Notebook displays / panels are not that expensive. The OLED panel costs around 200 euros, the Mini-LED LCD panel around 120 euros and the controller board around 60 euros.
I am also very curious which panel will look better, the very high brightness Mini-LED LCD panel with RGB subpixel structure or the medium high brightness OLED panel with this rather “weird” subpixel structure:
I keep you updated and will make some pictures, as soon as I received everything (everything comes from china, so will take a few weeks) and got the displays running properly, which I hope will work without any hassle.
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Pardon if this came up before, I just tried the reshade port, on the the github it says that the neutral settings are based on the Sony PVM 2730QM. However the results are very different for me. Because I used a 1200p monitor for testing, I used the 1080p (and SDR) setting in Megatron for these shots. GPU is Nivida (also tested on Surface laptop with Intel - also looks odd there). Example in Retroarch:
Via Reshade:
480p, in Reshade I had to set height to 600 in my case (because I’m integer scaling x2). There are also JPG artifacts here I suppose, I nabbed the shot some time ago from the web.
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Can you add 2560 x 1440p resolution for your shaders? I love them, and I would like to be able to enjoy them in the best possible way.
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Apologies for the late reply, hmm this difference might be due to the reshade port being slightly out of date. Do you want the reshade to look like the retroarch version or vice versa?
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Hi so although the shader parameters let you select 1080p, 4K etc it doesn’t mean you’re not able to get the very best experience for your monitor/resolution. All really these settings are doing is selecting the best CRT mask for your resolution to emulate slot mask/aperture grille/shadow mask. Those masks are really mostly the same thing.
For your resolution to get a perfect slot mask or aperture grille emulation you need 4 pixels for the mask (the default mask for 4K and 600TVL). Therefore the maximum CRT resolution you can emulate is 1440p / 4 pixels = 360TVL. Thats basically quite low to mid level CRT from the 80’s. 600TVL is towards the high end for the 1980’s.
There is a two pixel mask that is also widely used and that will get you a 720TVL image. You can get this by going to 1080p and selecting 600TVL.
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Hi @Dennis1 it really does sound like there’s a bug in one of my masks for the type of display you’re selecting/using. I will take a look at this when I get the chance and see if I can spot it. When you’ve been playing around with the mask did you see any changes? Just asking to make sure you’re editing the right mask obviously.
Do keep me updated on your notebook display this sounds really interesting - I will say that layout doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence but then I use my phone’s AMOLED display and its got a really strange sub pixel layout but you can’t tell because its so dense and impossible to distinguish with my eyesight at least (I dont need reading glasses at least)
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Thank you very much! I’m going to try these settings ^^
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No, the only changes are, that the colors change. There is no movement of the “phosphor” rows. I tried all combinations, but no success.
Both panels and the controller are on the way and should arrive within next two weeks. I have the feeling, that the Mini-LED panel will throw out the better picture, as it should be much brighter than the OLED panel. The contrast or black level advantage of the OLED panel might not be important here, as Mini-LED panels have many individual LED’s to deliver also high contrast levels and keep blooming or halo effects under control. For games I think this is less important anyway in comparison to watching movies which generally have more dark scenes. Also Mini-LED panels have the advantage of a RGB subpixel layout, like your Eve Spectrum Monitor.
But as you mentioned, it is almost impossible to see any differences as the “phosphors” are just too tiny, so despite the brightness advantage of the Mini-LED panel they should look pretty identical.
Before I ordered both panels I looked out for Notebooks and Monitors with Mini-LED panels and they are very expensive, below 1000 euros there is not a lot you can buy, especially with 4K resolution which is mandatory for good looking masks. So for around 120,- euros for the Mini-LED panel plus controller board it could be an absolute bargain if everything works. It does not have a case though, as it is just the pure panel, but there are also solutions for this, for example taking an old 15,6 inch PC monitor and swapping out the internals.
Building compact Arcade cabinets with Mini-LED panels is also an idea I have in my mind, as you can get pretty close to CRT quality with such good shaders like Megatron. In my opinion much better than those cabinets which just use cheap standard LCD panels and raw pixels without shader.
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If possible, I’d like to make reshade shaders consistent with retroarch.
Also an additional note about TVL: For SDTVs this seems to have been very much related to physical size. 360 TVL seems to be roughly what you can expect for 20" size. ~450-500 TVL is what I’ve seen advertised for larger (like 24" upwards) TVs.
For 1440p, you could pick the 4K setting and the 800 TVL which results in a 3pixel mask = 480 TVL.
Actually, because what matters ultimately here are the pixel of the masks and the actual TVL numbers are rounded down or up in various ways anyway because of the technical limitations (resulting then in 540 TVL for standard resolutions etc.), perhaps some additional explanation could be useful in the parameters? It seems to be confusing to a lot of people. 
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Having used both, I agree and think the reshade needs updated settings to match that of retroarch.
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Hopefully you have these by now! I agree the mini led because of its pure brightness will probably be the better display for this particular use case. The big thing though is what it looks like in motion. A great game to test clarity is Dynamite Headdy on the Megadrive as the first level zips by automatically at a fast pace and has lots of signage with text to read.
On my CRTs this is all crystal clear but my QD-OLED and IPS-LCD is not. Funnily enough the best flat screen is my phone an AMOLED 120hz display - it gets quite close to my CRTs.
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Yeah agreed its all a bit confusing. Mind you TVL itself is a very confusing number as its the number of vertical lines across the screen to the height of the screen across. This makes sense when you think about it but is super unintuitive. If you can think of ways for the parameters to be clearer Im very open to suggestions!
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Yes youre both right - ill find some time - theres only a few small changes but they are quite important!
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I’ve been trying to get these up and running with my new HDR monitor (Innocn 27M2U-D) but I’m having some sort of issue that I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of. With various Megatron shaders (including Cyberlord’s versions) the resulting image is always dark and kind of brownish grey - nothing like the nice photos I’ve seen in this thread and nothing like the CRT I’m comparing it against. I was, however, able to get a sort of okay looking image out of a couple of Cyberlord’s presets but the color was really bizarre looking - overly lime greens and garish bright reds.
I have HDR turned on in Windows and Retroarch, my nvidia settings are pretty much at defaults for my 3070, and the shader parameters are set to the default settings. I’m running the Steam version of 1.16.0. I can tell that HDR is on in retroarch because the menu looks obviously different and box art images are clearly not SDR. Other HDR content outside of retroarch looks fine on the display and doesn’t have any obvious color or brightness issues. It even gets eye-searingly bright sometimes. I’ve also gone through HDR calibration in Windows.
Other non-hdr specific retroarch shaders look great with fairly accurate colors and are plenty bright even with scanlines so I don’t think it’s an issue with the brightness or color reproduction of the display itself (but who knows, I guess. I don’t have another HDR display to try it on). I’ve tried D3D12 and Vulkan and it seems to look the same either way. I’ve also spent some time messing around with the shader parameters and tinkering hasn’t really gotten me anywhere. I took a few HDR screenshots that should hopefully illustrate what I’m seeing (if this is a lousy way to demonstrate I could try taking pictures of the display):
SMW: https://mega.nz/file/33gxiKxI#s922T5x_KCK18CzO6Y64lPJJ0ktFvperp8MvYtljqKI
Super Mario Bros NES: https://mega.nz/file/nvZXwTSR#UYy4A6bE3Mmzfsw86vIgKHO3wushZKdyr40mAKaQ-3g
Any idea what might be going on? Thanks
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Those screenshots look fine on my system, which suggests that it’s an output or display setting problem.
It kind of sounds like it might be chroma subsampling? Double check that you have 444 chroma working in HDR at the same refresh rate you are using for RetroArch: https://www.geeks3d.com/20141203/how-to-quickly-check-the-chroma-subsampling-used-with-your-4k-uhd-tv/
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For a more complete representation of what you’re experiencing, good quality photos of the screen should definitely help.
What NES Palette are you using? I use Sony CXA2025AS.
I only got a chance to look at the SDR versions of the images so far but I don’t expect the HDR ones to tell a different story. I would have to concur with @Azurfel. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the images in the jxr screenshots you shared.
You mention Windows HDR Calibration. Does that even have an effect on Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor?
Did you adjust the “Peak Luminance” and “Paper White Luminance” settings to match your display?
Also, did you adjust the “Display’s Subpixel Layout” setting to match your display?
Did you remember to update your Slang Shaders as well as install the recommended version of CRT-Guest-CRT-Advanced-NTSC?
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Essay incoming: I think I’ve got my issue figured out and I believe it was mostly thanks to me misunderstanding some things but I’ll elaborate for anyone else who comes across my posts here in the future:
It kind of sounds like it might be chroma subsampling? Double check that you have 444 chroma working in HDR at the same refresh rate you are using for RetroArch: https://www.geeks3d.com/20141203/how-to-quickly-check-the-chroma-subsampling-used-with-your-4k-uhd-tv/
Thanks, I checked this and it looked fine to me so I think I’m set correctly there.
What NES Palette are you using? I use Sony CXA2025AS.
I tried a bunch but couldn’t settle on one that I thought looked right. I switched to Sony CXA2025AS and it actually matched the look of my NES on my CRT very closely so I’ll leave it there. Thanks for the suggestion.
You mention Windows HDR Calibration. Does that even have an effect on Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor?
I think it must - it creates a color profile which I believe is used system wide.
Did you adjust the “Peak Luminance” and “Paper White Luminance” settings to match your display?
I spent a lot of time messing with Peak Luminance but didn’t really tweak Paper White Luminance very much (for some reason I thought I would need to keep it pretty low - I guess because the default settings are 800 / 200 so I was staying close to that ratio). I found that by setting Peak Luminance to my display’s claimed number and putting Paper White Luminance close to that value or 200 to 400 points under it I got much better results. I believe this was my main issue.
Also, did you adjust the “Display’s Subpixel Layout” setting to match your display?
I’m not really sure about this one. The monitor is a mini LED IPS but the manufacturer barely has any information available. Regardless, I tried the different settings for this in the shader parameters and none of them seemed dramatically different when viewed from a few feet away at least.
Did you remember to update your Slang Shaders as well as install the recommended version of CRT-Guest-CRT-Advanced-NTSC?
I did do this and I believe everything is installed correctly.
So, I believe I had a few different things going on, none of which are the fault of the shaders.
- Windows 11’s HDR implementation is finicky and really likes to drop out of the HDR mode completely or get stuck in some weird halfway mode where greens and reds are totally blown out but everything else looks dark and strange. This seems to be exacerbated by me going back and forth between retroarch cores and shaders that may or may not support vulkan/d3d12/d3d11. It is really easy to get Windows stuck doing this and the only way to fix it is toggling HDR back and forth to reset it. Probably also need to restart retroarch and maybe even Windows itself if the issue persists
- As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t try setting Paper White Luminance high enough. Once I did this, it fixed my problem with the dark output (at least once the Windows HDR problems were sorted).
- I think I kind of misunderstood the objective of these presets. I think for some reason I was expecting a general one size fits all sort of reference image but the real goal is to recreate the appearance of these very specific models so of course things are going to look different than the cheap CRT I’m used to.
So, for anyone with this monitor (Innocn 27M2U-D) or similar I had especially good results almost out of the box with the sony-pvm-2730-hdr and jvc-professional-TM-H1950CG-hdr presets.
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It’s probably RGB given the layout used by a different model from the same line. (see the RTINGS INNOCN 27M2V review Text Clarity section.)
Semi-relatedly, you’ll also want to make sure Megatron is set to Colour Accurate mode and “Original” for Original/Vivid.
Just to verify, when using HDR shaders, you have HDR enabled in RetroArch’s settings, and you are turning on HDR in Windows before you start RetroArch?
Also, look into using CRU to restart your GPU driver. Much simpler than fully restarting every single time something weird happens.
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what kind of tv should i buy to not deal with mask layout issues, a normal 4k hdr tv?
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