Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

[DevonCM]

@Azurfel

I suspected as much, and it isn’t a big issue by any means.

It’s a major issue, because having max brightness popups/widgets causes your eyes to adjust for that and makes the already-dim CRT shaders appear even darker, and that’s on top of burn-in concerns which are considerable in the case of something like the currently active achievement indicators.
Even “paper white luminance” is far too bright for the UI when you need to turn that up quite high to compensate for lack of fake bloom, or especially for something like the beam simulator.

There really ought to be fully separate luminance controls for the entire UI, as many of the benefits of HDR can’t be fully realized/appreciated without that.

Also for the benefit of the beam simulator or BFI, a setting to automatically lower the overall luminance by the selected sub-frame ratio during fast-forward/pause/menuing would make those features drastically more usable. As it is, you basically need a hotkey to drop your monitor brightness (thanks, Twinkle Tray) every time you want to do one of those things or it shocks your eyes, your pupils contract, and then the game appears extra dim for a while until you have time to readjust.

[Azurfel]

@DevonCM

There really ought to be fully separate luminance controls for the entire UI, as many of the benefits of HDR can’t be fully realized/appreciated without that.

Aside from the popups, we effectively have a UI brightness setting now, it’s just not intuitive.

Set both of the RetroArch menu HDR luminance settings to 100 (or 203 if you prefer), and then use either “crt-sony-megatron-v2-default-config.slangp”, the AzMods version of Megatron v2, or “hdr-config.slangp” whenever you need higher content luminance than that.

An actual, more intuitive UI brightness setting would still be better, especially for anyone who wants to use the internal scanline option, but at least we have something.

And yeah, i suppose i’ve gotten so used to the popup brightness over the last several years that i was thinking of it as less of an issue than it actually is (and like i said, i do disable the fast forward popup for anything that tends to involves a lot of fast forwarding.)

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Thanks for all the great work documenting these things it really helps, I could fix this relatively easily but at a performance cost which is quite significant on low end ARM processors - my OnePlus Pad 3 drops frames and sound corrupts with the fix. Id quite like to see if anybody more adept with the widget system could help first. Sadly my time on this is rapidly running out and I need to get back to things.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Fully appreciate its not ideal but its better than what we had before is it not?

[Azurfel]

How difficult would it be to make the fix an advanced setting with warnings that it shouldn’t be used on lower end devices? It would definitely be a bandaid, but it would be a much appreciated quality of life upgrade for those of us on desktops.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

That’s a great work around, definitely not ideal but it works. As I say the real fix to this is a flag to say any widgets are visible on screen and then to render to the whole off screen buffer thing we do for the menu and overlays. This is a 4k write and then blend on my tablet which is why its slow, mind you I suspect there is something up with the vulkan transitions as it shouldn’t be that slow - Id expect a Raspberry Pi to struggle but not a Snapdragon 8 Elite.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Yeah I was thinking that but believe me its probably WAY more work to add that than to add a flag is widget visible. I also really hate cluttering up the UI with debug options but thats subjective admittedly.

[Azurfel]

@MajorPainTheCactus

That’s a great work around, definitely not ideal but it works. As I say the real fix to this is a flag to say any widgets are visible on screen and then to render to the whole off screen buffer thing we do for the menu and overlays.

That workaround doesn’t effect the popup brightness unfortunately, those are stuck at 10000 nits regardless. The workaround just leaves the rest of the menu locked to 100 nits while having actual content luminance up in the 600+ range needed for Megatron.

Like you said, we need something else for the widgets.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Im going to post an issue on Github and see if the widget community knows a way. Its quite an big system and my first obvious attempts failed.

[Cyber]

Just posting this as an FYI. Maybe it might help in maintaining and evolving support for WOLED panels as some users of 1440p WOLED non-RWBG displays are yet to get subpixel level CRT shaders working/looking properly for them.

1440p RGWB WOLED panel subpixel layout

[Azurfel]

@MajorPainTheCactus Just tested the latest nightly with “HDR: Replace expand gamut toggle with multi-mode gamut selection (#18676)” and “Vulkan: Fix HDR pipeline blend factors and quad vertex buffer handling (#18678)” merged.

I can confirm that all the known shader issues with vulkan are now resolved. I didn’t test literally every single shader, but i tried everything i personally use, plus a random smattering of others, and i couldn’t find any that didn’t work as expected.

For the new Colour Boost settings: Accurate, Expanded, and Super are all working as expected. Something seems to have gone wrong with Wide tho, as it is significantly out of alignment with the P3 gamut (the middle of the three triangles):

And finally, in vulkan, i am now seeing unusual high-brightness artifacts around some menu text that overlaps with active content:

Note the full white outline/drop-shadow effect around some of the text, which accounts for all pixels with a brightness above 100.2 nits.

An equivalent image from yesterday’s build, which did not have this bug:

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Brilliant stuff, Ill take a look my guess is that its an incorrectly transposed matrix Ill take a look tonight. As for the text corruption - lets see if the fix from this morning fixes it.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Hi Cyber yeah I need to take a look at the masks again, I will do.

[Azurfel]

Sounds good! I will test again and report back once “Vulkan: Fix HDR pipeline init indentation and use sdr_render_pass #18680” has been merged.

Edit: “Vulkan: Fix HDR pipeline init indentation and use sdr_render_pass #18680” and “HDR: Fix WIDE gamut mode with direct P3-to-2020 colour matrix (#18682)” have been merged, but i don’t think they made it into the current nightly. Waiting on the next one.