Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1759

I understand my display isn’t very bright, but shouldn’t the max nits setting do something?

As I said earlier, it has no effect whatsoever either in the Retroarch HDR settings or the Shader Parameters. That makes me wonder if there’s something that isn’t configured right.

I should be able to see some noticeable change as I increase it between 0 and 10,000, right?

This makes me think rancid/cyber are on to something in their suspicion that under some circumstances, HDR isn’t getting properly recognized or activated! Will do more testing tonight as it seems like doing things in a certain order makes a difference, even when settings are the same.

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#1760

Brilliant!

I just tried loading up Super Mario World with the default megatron shader at default settings, then disabling HDR in Retroarch, then re-enabling it. Results are night and day!

No longer is there any of that sepia stuff – the colors pop right away where it looked like pea soup at default settings before, and the Display Peak Luminance setting actually works! The image now looks fabulous at 600 TVL instead of 1000, and it’s pretty clear my humble Q2721S CAN do a nice looking HDR image!

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#1761

I won’t say that I’m worse off than you because I’ve gotten it to work.

There seems to be some strange interaction taking place between the Mega Bezel Reflection Shader (which last time I checked does not support HDR, at least when using Vulkan) and trying to switch to Vulkan with HDR to run Sony Megatron Shaders.

It appears as if Mega Bezel Reflection Shader isn’t fully unloading before Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor is trying to load.

I’ve been observing carefully and in Vulkan Mode, even after I load a Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset, when I switch HDR On, I’ve seen it switch to HDR On in RetroArch briefly and can see the Mega Bezel and onscreen graphics get Bright and Vivid and the HDR notification comes up on my TV but then I can see the Graphics Immediately get back dull when the Bezel disappears and I guess the Megatron Shader loads or reloads. So it appears as if HDR is being switched on but immediately turns itself off on my particular configuration.

So when loading a Sony Megatron Preset using Vulkan and HDR is switched On, it almost always comes off by the time the preset is finished reloading.

Using D3D12, things aren’t so bad. Possibly because Mega Bezel supports HDR using that driver? Also, the D3D12 HDR mode only seem to work when HDR is turned on in Windows.

@rancid, I’ve since tested and made a preset using HDR Game Mode and what I had to do was raise the Paper White Luminance and the Saturation a bit higher than I had to when using the HDR Bright Mode but it works and looks great!

I have a feeling that if I decouple my RetroArch configuration from Mega Bezel Reflection Shader, I might get some improvement in my Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor experience using Vulkan and HDR.

1 Like
#1762

Same - paper white, contrast, and saturation are the three main settings to tweak. I’ve played with 3 different HDR displays tonight and those values I can get an excellent image using your driver swap trick.

I am loading the shader directly without loading your pack and still have the same behavior, I think this is an issue with retroarch quite honestly and how it enables HDR shaders. I say this because with HDR enabled the menu is still in SDR, once you swap from Vulkan to DX12 it enables HDR correctly in the menus (notice everything is neon green and much, much brighter).

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#1763

Have you disabled or removed all Global, Core, Game and Directory Presets which would attempt to load a Mega Bezel Preset?

I’m still yet to try that so a Mega Bezel Preset always loads before I attempt to load my Sony Megatron Preset.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

Well at least now I can finally appreciate how amazing this shader is and our OLED TVs are definitely more than bright enough to use this Shader in all its glory.

Seeing everything pop now is a wonderful experience. Now I’m really spoilt for choice once again.

I love the efficiency of this shader though, I would say that the amount of quality you get for the small performance cost is mind blowing. I think it’s actually a perfect candidate to power some arcade cabinets using mini PCs with little APUs (or older hardware) and some decent enough HDR IPS or OLED screens.

I mean, this thing runs on my cellphone!

Hopefully we can have a proper guide for new users that will assist them in working around and avoiding the potential issues we have been experiencing until a more robust solution is found.

@c9f5fdda06, I haven’t heard anything from you yet. I think you said you were never able to get this shader working and looking properly. How’s it going now?

Also @Wilch and @Nesguy.

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#1764

Id really turn on colour accurate if your displays supports HDR10 (rec. 2020) colour properly as the native colours of your OLED sub pixels will be different to what the rec. 709/601 standards had and so your colours will be way off. The only thing Id say about that though is that no display has 100% rec. 2020 colour coverage and so itll be somewhere between rec.709 and rec. 2020 and therefore depending on your displays coverage you might get away with using mask accurate.

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#1765

Really great investigation - so this makes some sense as I implemented RetroArch to detect if the last pass is a hdr formatted render target to turn off (skip) hdr (shaders) that I built into retro arch as I deem that the custom shader will do that hdr work instead. Im guessing mega bezel has a non hdr format last pass and so is falling back to the built in hdr. This is fine but requires that sony Megatron is in SDR mode (and to use RetroArch menu for the hdr settings). I know this all a bit convoluted but its the easiest way to get everything working properly - mega bezel has to be backwards compatible and you end up with pretty much the same results using the built in hdr. Having said all that this could be due to a bug and not what Ive just said.

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#1766

Good to know - as the author hdr in RetroArch this is something I should investigate and fix. I now need to repro it and find some time to fix it properly. Dx12 is the gold standard driver for hdr - Microsoft put a lot of effort into support for it where as Vulkans support is quite minimal (but also a hell of a lot simpler to implement)

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#1767

@MajorPainTheCactus, is it possible for you to create a custom calibration image to assist users in objectively calculating their paper white settings? For example a white Square with a grey cross (or smaller square) in the center that disappears when it is set to the correct level?

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#1768

I was using the 240p test suite to calibrate brightness and contrast, but it wasn’t made for HDR so doesn’t fully work, but will get you somewhat there: https://artemiourbina.itch.io/240p-test-suite

@MajorPainTheCactus - This is far and away one of the best shaders in Retroarch, IMO this is the future of shaders right now. I honestly never thought I’d give up the consumerCRT shader, but the HDR ones are just incredible once properly setup. I spent about 3 hours on this alongside Cyber last night and I had issues with Vulkan with it working at times, DX12 if you toggled HDR on after loading a shader it worked every single time.

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#1769

Great to hear you’re finally able to get HDR working! Apologies for the instability and thanks to @Cyber for the help. So do we know what exactly is causing vulkan hdr not to work? How did you fix it? Did you just swap drivers to d3d12 abd then back again? Does it now work all the time for vulkan or are you having to use the d3d12 driver?

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#1770

If I had the time I absolutely would but Ive given up my job to found a start up and Im full crank trying to get that project up to a releasable standard. Sadly its probably going to have to wait.

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#1771

Now that we’re narrowing down the problem and have a good workaround in D3D12 we can probably focus on reproducing the issues with Vulkan.

So far Vulkan seems to work sometimes. I’ve gotten it to work, tweaked a new preset, changed games (which in my case loads Mega Bezel first) and then when I load that same preset I just created and turn HDR On, no HDR even though it might appear to be on because it might have turned on (which causes the HDR notification to display), then turned itself off on loading the preset. During that time as I mentioned before I noticed the Mega Bezel reflective Bezel and the game which I had loaded previously get bright and vivid (just as the HDR logo came on) then the game switched aspect ratios (due to the Mega Bezel setting of Full Aspect ratio), the Bezel disappears but it appears dull and sepia toned (Megatron Preset loaded but HDR Off). When this happens HDR is still On in RetroArch’s HDR menu though but on-screen it is clearly Off.

It’s possible that even the TV still thinks it is on but I have to check the Picture Options to confirm that.

I think what might work is to load a game then load two different Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor presets then toggle Vulkan On but I’ll have to test this.

The problem is sometimes trying to toggle Vulkan On and Off then back on again in rapid succession sometimes results in a soft lock of RetroArch at best or handshaking issues at worse causing me to lose display input and have to power down my PC and start over again.

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#1772

Hmm so although not great its generally the case that you need to restart RetroArch when changing video drivers - sure it might work superficially but its certainly not a cast iron guarantee everything works until RetroArch is restarted. However once you do restart you shouldnt have problems and you dont need to restart RetroArch no matter what you do. Does HDR ever not work if you dont swap drivers? It certainly sounds as if the problems weve had above is more serious than just needing a restart of RetroArch after swapping drivers?

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#1773

Noted. I think I might have opened RetroArch then switched drivers to D3D12 then loaded a game or switched games then loaded the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset before toggling HDR On.

I can’t remember specifically exiting or restarting RetroArch after changing drivers unless it was required for the change to persist.

I would say yes there have been many times when HDR did not work if I did not swap drivers. I only tried the driver swap later on in my troubleshooting but I’ve mentioned that I’ve tweaked a preset where everything looked fine, then switched games then reloaded the preset and it looked like a mess. It had me second guessing myself, wondering if I had imagined it was looking good or if that might have been due to eye or mental fatigue.

After I got it to work properly using the D3D12 trick and loaded a preset I just saved and it didn’t look proper, I knew that time that I wasn’t going crazy.

That was when I toggled HDR Off then On again and the colours and brightness came to life right in front of me because it worked!

Do remember that during the earlier part of troubleshooting users including myself might have been struggling to get their Paperwhite and other settings to look right, while unbeknownst to us, HDR might have not engaged properly leading to the hack job of extreme settings posted initially and also confusion to us because it looked like crap compared to “regular” shaders and everything looked dark and colours were wrong plus switching the Shader Parameters setting from HDR to SDR resulted in a much brighter picture with much more accurate looking colours.

So that led me to speculate that the HDR/SDR switch (In shader Parameters) might have been “wired” backwards.

Now that it’s a new day, having made progress and documenting our struggles and successes, we might have a little more clarity, especially since we should by now know what good paperwite luminance settings to use for our displays.

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#1774

The fix for me is to load a game without a shader enabled, select the shader I want to use and it will be washed out. Go into the settings and select DX12 instead of Vulkan, disable HDR, re-enable HDR.

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#1775

Ok so yes toggling hdr on/off in the main video menu should have a similar effect to restarting RetroArch. So once weve got it working does it ever not work (apart from when we hot swap drivers)?

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#1776

Ok great stuff so now that youve got it working in dx12 have you been able to get it working in vulkan at all?

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#1777

Yes, there have been many times when HDR did not work if I didn’t swap drivers.

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#1778

Swapping drivers alone isn’t enough to fix it on my machine, toggling off HDR first and then back on seems to fix it after switching drivers. I have same behavior as Cyber, I can get Vulkan to work maybe once out of 5 tries but with DX12 it is every time if I follow the procedure. Is there a way to set up debugging in retroarch and I can send you a log?

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