I’m having trouble trying to set up a CRT filter to use with PCSX2 through reshade. I have a 1440p OLED and was trying to follow this guide, but can’t get the megatron shader’s brightness to look right. What should I set the CRT_height preprocessor definition to for 1440? setting it to 1440 makes the image way too dark, and 2160 is too bright. Also the autohdr plugin by lilium says that HDR is disabled, even though its outputting an hdr image. the colors look washed out and off.
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First off: you don’t want to use both the AutoHDR shader and the Megatron shader at the same time. They both tonemap the AutoHDR add-on’s output (the add-on is separate from the shader), so if you use both at once you are double tonemapping, resulting in a washed out image.
If you disable all shaders, the color should go absolutely nuclear. If it doesn’t, the AutoHDR add-on isn’t working, and you need to sort that out first.
For Megatron: BUFFER_WIDTH for width and 480 for height. Make sure you have screen offsets on and integer scaling on in PCSX2 options (Graphics>Display section).
This should result in a windowboxed image (black bars on all sides) if you have a 4K display (480x4=1920, leaving 240 extra black lines), or just pillarboxing (black bars on the sides) with a 1440p (480x3=1440) or 8K (480x9=4320) display.
Make sure you have Megatron’s Original/Vivid setting set to Original, and Mask Accurate/Colour Accurate to Colour Accurate, Colour System to 0/r709, and Phosphors to 0/NONE. (Colour System and Phosphors don’t work correctly, with the result being clamped to rec 709.)
I have a version of the Megatron reshade with the “HDR: Content Color Gamut” setting from my AzMods testing fork ported over that i haven’t released publicly. If you want to use the alternate gamuts the Colour System and Phosphors settings incorrectly implement, i can get that ready to share.
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with all shaders disabled and the autohdr addon activated, the image looks completely washed out. Activating the lilium inverse tonemapping shader makes it look normal again, but the megatron shader does not. it just applies the filter over the washed out image without tonemapping it. I guess maybe the autohdr plugin has issues with pcsx2?
Go to the “Add-ons” tab in ReShade, make sure that the AutoHDR add-on is enabled, and if so, click the arrow next to the AutoHDR add-on.
What does it say?
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“HDR support is not enabled. If hardware can support it, please go to Windows ‘Display Settings’ and then turn on HDR”.
The strange part is that PCSX2 is still displaying an HDR image despite the addon saying it isnt working. I know this because when I change the SDR brightness slider in windows, PCSX2’s brightness stays unchanged. HDR mode is definitely enabled in windows as well.
Ah, found the issue.
Switch to DX11 in PCSX2 and reinstall ReShade to match. AutoHDR doesn’t seem to work with PCSX2’s Vulkan renderer.
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setting the peak luminance to a super high value like 5000 also improves the highlights, but still not as much as my previous setup.
oh, nice find. the addon seems to be working now, but for some reason the highlights are much dimmer than with my previous setup with lilium inverse tonemapping + crt_guest_advanced. are any of these settings incorrect? I have an MSI 271QPX (1440p QD Oled Monitor). Changing CRT_Height to 2160 make the highlights a lot brighter, but also crushes them.
CRT-Guest-Advanced and other shaders perform a lot of clever brightness tricks which result in the CRT emulation drifting from being as accurate as possible. Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor does none of that.
So prepare to adjust settings like Gamma and Saturation in order to get the most out of your monitor after adjusting the Peak and Paper White Luminance values.
For starters, 420 nits Peak Luminance seems a bit low for Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor when a minimum HDR600 capable display is recommended with at least HDR1000 being preferred.
200 nits Paper White Luminance is also extremely low and you would very likely end up with a darkened image. How did you arrive at just 200 nits?
At this point you can try @Dennis1’s settings as a starting point or even download and open some of my slangp presets and plug in some values but you may not get that far if your display is not capable of at least around 600 nits. Don’t be afraid to set the Peak and Paper White Luminance to the same values if that’s what you need to do to get some brightness out of the display.
Then go ahead touch the Gamma setting. It won’t bite. Image too pale and washed out but bright enough. Adjust saturation. Do whatever it takes to arrive at your destination with your particular display. No one else is seeing what you’re seeing.
On that note, it’s a good idea when posting these types of issues to take some high quality photos of the shader in action so that others may at least have a better point of reference for how far off things might be.
Instead of just relying on youe descriptions and our imagination.
You should probably leave this at 480 because that’s the number of scanlines of the CRT you’re trying to emulate.
Also if you set the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor Shader to SDR mode, you can use other shaders or tools to perform the conversion to HDR and tonemapping for example Lilium Inverse Tonemapping.
The MSI 271QPX is effectively a 400 nit display, and as such likely isn’t going to give you the results you are looking for. (You really need 600-800 nits for Megatron to shine.)
It also has a bad subpixel layout for this use-case (it’s one of those weird triangular layouts, not RWBG).
That said, try peak luminance 450 with various paper white settings in the 300-400 range, and experiment with the different subpixel layouts.
And to emphasize: if you are using a CRT_HEIGHT setting higher than 480 at that screen resolution, there is no reason to be using a CRT shader. This isn’t a setting you can tweak to get extra brightness. It’s the single most important setting in the shader, and everything else needs to be built around it.
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That makes me curious. Dennis1 points out that he set the height to 2160p when trying to accurately replicate his CRT’s slot mask at 480p. How come that’s different? I know I’ve found when I try setting Megatron to 480p height, any mask that isn’t strictly the aperture grill one looks very off. I’m curious to know which is more accurate in the long-run since I don’t have a CRT to directly compare with.
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That is effectively putting a full strength mask overlay on top of… well, whatever resolution the image you are putting it on top of is (after it’s been scaled to 2160p).
Slot mask CRTs often don’t have visible scanlines, especially for 480 line content, so i suppose that isn’t a completely invalid way to go. Would basically be mimicking a low-TVL 4K slot mask CRT PC monitor in practice. Which isn’t something that ever actually existed, but that is entirely beside the point xD
Are the the other masks looking off even with TVL settings set to 800/1000 (assuming you run indeed in 4k)?
Yes, the TVL doesn’t seem to make it look any more or less correct, the image still seems wrong. This is all at 4K, but the emulator resolution is 480p because I’m using the Reshade version on PCSX2. Changing the TVL seems to scale fine with the Aperture stuff at 480p, but Shadow and Slot don’t.
Examples: https://imgur.com/a/1w1qp0Q
There’s some compression weirdness there (random red and green streaks are in the pics but not in person), but by-and-large, how the overall masks look is how they appear.
I’ve fiddled with the TVL and resolution sizes (I’m using 800TVL and 8K as per Dennis1’s recommendations as I like that look the best too), but the thing that really seems to kill it is setting the resolution height to 480.
I didn’t provide examples of the Shadow Mask in there but it looks borked in a similar way at 480 to the Slot Mask example. The only one whose mask stays uniform is the Aperture Grille, which is weird to me because you’d think that’d break too, but it doesn’t seem to. Unless it DOES also look wrong and it just doesn’t to me because I don’t have a frame of reference.
Well, in my experience, shader heights in Reshade need to be set to even dividers of the screen output (unless you’re running a window), so you could try setting it to 540 instead.
Another possible reason that slot and shadow masks are off is that they need higher/suitable scaling factors when using certain masks. They will work fine with low-res but not higher res content.
This is more evident in Guest’s shaders, because you can see the “slot mask height” and “mask shift parameters”, but not in Megatron.
I’ve tried 540 before as well and even that didn’t work, sadly. I think you’re onto something, though. That said it’s not the end of the world, I think the 2160 setting can still look good, and 480 on the Aperture Grille mask still looks like a fine enough option.
Yeah, that doesn’t look right. Is the image stretching to full 2160 height? 480p needs to be windowboxed (black bars on all sides) at 2160p for proper scaling. (2160/480=4.5, which isn’t integer. Needs to be 480*4=1920.)
Unfortunately it can be kind of a pain to get PCSX2 to properly integer scale internal resolutions higher than monitor res. You need screen offsets on and integer scaling on in PCSX2 options, but sometimes it will stretch anyway. If so a custom 2560x1920 resolution should scale everything properly, assuming you have integer scaling enabled in your GPU settings. (3412x1920 for widescreen.)
I have black bars on all sides because I run my games in Software mode, and that’s pretty much the biggest immediate giveaway that it’s working. It only fills the 2160 height in Hardware mode. I also have both Screen Offsets and Integer Scaling turned on, but whether I’m in Software mode or Hardware mode, the issue persists. This is my list of settings: https://i.imgur.com/NuRthf8.png
It says I’m using DX12 but that’s just because I launch in Hardware mode and then switch to Software mode, otherwise Reshade won’t work in Software mode for me. All my emulators make Megatron’s masks do that in 480p though, I just figured I’d use PCSX2 since it was the most relevant example.
Greetings @Azurfel, @MajorPaintheCactus!
Can support be added for this new OLED subpixel layout to the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor shader and would it be a trivial task if possible?
Another thing than can help in some instances, though not sounding like it’s likely the case in yours, is changing a setting in the nvidia control panel in Manage 3d Settings (if you’re using one of their GPUs)
Vulkan/OpenGL present method - change to Prefer layered on DXGI swapchain helped my own particular issues using HDR with PCSX2
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