This stuff needs to be simplified!

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

There are currently “shaders” and “filters” as an option, and it doesn’t tell me the difference between them, and there is often even another shade or filter thing within the core options itself, after you load a game.

Clicking either option brings up a huge list of confusing names and acroynms, without any explanation, and we just have to work out how they look (usually by testing them individually, which takes ages).

Meanwhile in ZSNES, I just click “CRT filter”, and it looks even better than the retroarch stuff, at a fraction of CPU power!

This needs to be simplified and more like ZSNES. First of all, combine filters and shaders into one single option for all games. Second, just let us select “CRT mode” or “high resolution mode” or whatever. We shouldn’t have to spend hours looking around for information, just to do it again next console we load… it should just be combined together into one simple “CRT filter”.

#2

  1. What you call ‘filters’ are just CPU image routines, they are not to be confused with ‘shaders’. They are two very distinct things. It is not up to us to educate you on what a ‘shader’ is, everybody who even remotely has any interest in modern day GPU or GL programming knows what it is. Go read anandtech or ars-technica or beyond3d or something and learn. I am not going to be dumbing down commonly used terminology because you are uninterested in learning about it.

  2. I am never going to ‘bake in’ certain shaders or filters like so many other programs out there. We only bake in shaders on certain targets like the consoles since they have no dynamic loading support, and it should not be considered a ‘feature’, but a limitation. They should be optionally loaded in. This is a conscious choice. You will probably understand this choice if you start thinking about it from a better perspective than just ‘gotta dumb things down for the lowest common denominator’.

  3. Regarding zsnes this or that, look at 1 or 2. It is probably just a dumb CRT CPU filter that doesn’t even do all that much other than add some scanlines. Also, RetroArch/libretro is not about just being some kind of emulator. I do not like to be pigeonholed to do stuff a certain way thank you very much.

Anyway, I really have to say, your response comes off as very irritating and annoying and it betrays that you just want things massively dumbed down for you because seeing a term you are unfamiliar with upsets you. We have a vibrant shader community exactly because we leave it up to the user what to use and what to choose. There is no other program out there outside of ShaderToy where the individual user has the chance to write their own shaders, toy with it to such an extent, and see the fruits of their labor appear onscreen immediately. No way in hell are we going to sacrifice that. We are proud of this. If it doesn’t float your boat, too bad, I consider this kind of halfway literate community worthwhile to have vs. hordes of simpletons who don’t want to do anything other but consume and don’t want to have their intellectual curiosity or creation spirit tinkled.

1 Like
#3

You might get the info you want by reading these two wikis:

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

These two wikis cover some of the filters and shaders available in Retroarch. With time you get used to the terminology used. Ask specific questions in this forum.

#4

+1 the ability to stack shaders and go in and tinker with the code has allowed even idiots like me with no programming experience to make something fun, and being able to customize things your own way is so much more rewarding than using someone else’s pre-baked idea of what constitutes a “good” picture. I only wish more software was like this.

#5

Meanwhile in ZSNES, I just click “CRT filter”, and it looks even better than the retroarch stuff, at a fraction of CPU power!

What CRT filter are you talking about? I saw no such option for any “CRT filter” in the latest ZSNES release other than scanlines and NTSC filters, neither of which are comparable to CRT shaders like CRT-Royale or CRT-Geom. And the NTSC with scanlines filter doesn’t look very good at all since the scanlines are uneven (even when I set output size to an integer scale of 224…) and the NTSC blurring looks aliased (like it was blurred to 512 width, then nearest scaled the rest of the way). As for CPU power, software filters like blargg’s NTSC is more CPU intensive than a pixel shader that is run on a GPU such as Maister’s NTSC shader.

I think this post was just a trolling attempt to be honest.

[QUOTE=Hyllian;35536]You might get the info you want by reading these two wikis:

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

These two wikis cover some of the filters and shaders available in Retroarch. With time you get used to the terminology used. Ask specific questions in this forum.[/QUOTE]

The emulation Wikia is abandoned and everything was moved to gametechwiki, but Wikia admins would not let them delete the old wiki, so it remains up with many pages outdated. The one on gametechwiki is the only one that should be used.

#6

While I think this topic probably was gone about in the wrong way, I can appreciate not understanding some of the ‘shader’ lingo. I’m still learning myself and certainly have a long way to go. At my current level, my only real gripe would be the naming scheme that the shader files have. Scalenx, xbr, crt, ddt, eagle. etc, etc, etc.

While I’m sure they make total sense to someone who’s fully versed in the topic, and I’m not even remotely suggesting everything be made ‘idiot-proof’, it certainly isn’t something I’d consider inviting or ‘user-friendly’.

Again simply referring to the naming of the shaders.

Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents on the subject.

#7

I don’t know if anything I am about to say would be feasible or make any sense in doing but would it be possible to maybe streamline a lot of the shader stuff in the official stable releases to only include the stuff that most people actually use ? And then for the more advanced users who really love to play around with and tweak with settings have an “Advanced Shaders” pack. I know it took me a while to really grasp what all of it meant and I am still learning it all but it can be really daunting for newer users. Like SkyHighGam3r I am not saying make it idiot proof at all but I think having a “noob friendly” and “advanced nerd” setting for people would be really handy. No idea how much effort that would entail at all and I am fine with things the way they are. This is purely just me thinking out loud.

#8

It’s really really hard to be noob friendly and a power user tool at the same time, we’re more inclined to the later.

#9

Oh I fully agree. Like I said, just thinking out loud about something that I really have no clue how much effort would be involved in having some sort of “switch” to toggle between noob and non noob friendly mode to at least cut down on the shear number of options visible. I just remember when I first started using Retroarch and diving into the shaders menu it was pretty overwhelming but fortunately for me that doesn’t put me off things. Would have been nice though if the more commonly used and popular shaders were put in a place a little more up front and visible rather than buried so deep in the menus. I probably spent about 2 weeks going through the different shaders and reading the shaders section here on the forums to see what I liked and didn’t like and what other people were doing. I finally settled on a modified setup that someone posted.

#10

We already simplified everything quite a bit by giving everything a shader preset (thanks to Hyllian for taking on that huge PIA task), so most users never need to fiddle with individual shader passes. We’ve discussed picking a few commonly used shaders and making them more visible. However, we don’t like playing favorites and only exposing a handful of shaders like that would put us in the position of picking winners and losers.

As for the naming schemes, we didn’t come up with them. They’re generally names of existing algorithms (hqnx), names picked out by the author(s) (xBR, GTU, etc.) or something named after the author (crt-lottes, mudlord-waterpaint, etc.). Just like with the cores, for which we maintain the names unless requested otherwise by upstream, we stick with the original names out of respect for the original work.

#11

[QUOTE=hunterk;35754] However, we don’t like playing favorites and only exposing a handful of shaders like that would put us in the position of picking winners and losers.[/QUOTE] Fair enough on this point.

#12

Yeah, I figured there was some kind of reason behind the naming scheme.

If anyone is interested I found a quick solution once you’ve found shaders you like. Just save a preset in the root shader folder.

I used the Analog TV packs that are on display in the other forum here, and the Scalenx-3x shader and renamed some presets as

Composite-240p S-Video-240p RGB-Scart-240p RGB-Sony PVM-240p Component-480p HDMI-1080P

So all I have to do is click on “Load shader preset” and those options are right there in all of my systems.

Obviously that’s not a solution that can be implemented across the board, but it’s a nice feature once you’ve found some shaders you really like.

I show how easy it is to swap them like that in this video at about 8:40 in. The quality isn’t awesome, so please keep that in mind.

#13

[QUOTE=SkyHighGam3r;35828]I show how easy it is to swap them like that in this video at about 8:40 in. The quality isn’t awesome, so please keep that in mind. [/QUOTE] There are Shader Previous and Shader Next hotkeys (N and M by default) that you can use to switch between shaders in your root shader folder on the fly. You can set those to gamepad inputs like any other hotkey too.

#14

Whaaaaat!? Dude that is amazing! I wonder if I have any more room for gamepad input combos left… I took up a good amount of them setting controls for winamp to run in the background lol. That and I’m running out of keyboard. 2 full Xbox Pads and various functions… lol

I’ll have to try that out tonight though, thanks!

#15

one thing I really miss with shader handling in retroarch would be the option to load cgps on top of each other. right now if a specific combination is not already there as a preset one has to add the individual passes of each filter. it would be also nice to allow the user to not only add additional passes at the end of the shader list but also at the beginning in the case of preshaders like color modifications and such.

#16

I agree!

The entire process for editing an existing preset is very complex via the GUI. (is there another way?)

For instance, I downloaded the analog video packs from another thread, and wanted to use say… shader 2, 7, 12, and 15 from a preset… But you can’t just turn off the other ones.

#17

Yes, i agree… i have to do that manualy via text editor :confused: Also live preview when making changes would also helped…