Came across this video. So do y’all agree?
I didn’t ever think I would be able to play old console games emulated on my computer with simulated CRT shaders, but now we can… so who knows what we will have in the future.
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Yea, like I have a CRT on the folder in the hallway. However, I’m not trying to lift that up just to not have the modern commodities (I.E. Fantranslated roms and that A.I. translation with RA). It’s good enough for me NOT to see pixels.
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I don’t think it needs to match. Even a basic CRT shader is good enough for me.
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there are such shaders but they become eye straining after a while, just like real crts
I think shaders stand on their own merits and are not just meant to replace the other.
It’s like guitar amp modeling or drum sampling when convolution got better in digital audio. Some bands like Meshuggah embraced it and changed their production techniques. Others like QOTSA sticked to recording all analog in their studio sessions.
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I don’t see any specific criticism like i loaded “x” shader and it doesn’t do “a” and “b”. Just loaded some basic shaders in “scanline” folder and a lottes variant probably and then some general stuff like “it doesn’t emulate phosphor decay” and things like that. Having a CRT i can see pixel shape is recreated well in lanczos shaders (crt-geom and others), and that isn’t a rule, some other CRTs will have blurrier or sharper edges pixels.
What can’t be emulated perfectly is mask, except some fine mask in PVM style that a 1080p or 1440p is enough more or less. Scanline beam dynamics are well recreated too. What he sees in CRT and missing on a shader is more LIGHT that is spreaded in all screen even in CRT subpixel level.
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Monitor hardware isn’t there yet.
To allocate one (horizontal) monitor pixel to each CRT (aperture grille) subpixel of an 800 TVL CRT would require a 16::9 monitor to have a horizontal resolution of 8534.
To hit the CRT white level of ~150-200 cd/m^2 while sacrificing ~5/6 brightness to simulate scanlines and aperture grille would require a monitor to have a ~900-1200 cd/m^2 white level.
If we had a monitor that satisfied those criteria, you could write a shader to simulate the tube on the back of a napkin. But we don’t, so you can’t.
In addition to that, you’d need to simulate the NTSC/composite artifacts, the “color correction circuit,” the gamma function, and the phosphor gamut. In the past couple years, those are all at least “mostly solved” problems. (See here and here.) Even if the popular CRT shaders don’t really address them.
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So, that means I have to buy a CRT TV and lose access of playing romhacks? 
All i need the shader to do is to blend the pixels in the same way a CRT does, so that the 2D art looks correct and not like a bunch of sharp, visible pixels. The later is something most modern “retro” pixel art games do and it really grinds my gears.
That and for the scanlines to look evenly distributed and hide the fact they are not when playing in non-integer resolutions.
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Ngl, As much as I love The Erdrick trilogy HD-2D, I can’t stand the pixelation in those games. Like hell nah.
I mean, you can hook up a CRT TV (or monitor) to a computer, and, iirc, RetroArch even has support for that built in, if you want to go that route.
That’s unnecessary amount of work, smh. I still have my RCA in the other room the problem is no component input. Only RF, Composite and S-Video.
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The real hitch is that most of the CRT “magic” is happening in your brain, not in the optics of the CRT. When you look at a CRT image, your brain is subconsciously doing a lot of smoothing, filtering, edge interpolation, etc. in a selective way based on your higher level understanding of what you’re looking at. For instance: If you see scanline gaps over solid blue water, your brain interprets them as waves. If you see scanline gaps over solid blue sky, your brain interprets them as foreground noise (like looking at the sky through chicken-wire-reinforced school bus windows) and filters them out.
It’s not possible to make a shader do that, or even anything close.
The other path towards the desired result is to simulate a CRT well enough to convince your brain to do all this. The price is that, while they do trigger this desirable psychovisual stuff, scanline gaps, and halation, and visible subpixels, and so on, all look objectively bad by every other measure. My personal preference is for just enough CRTishness to get the brain doing the psychovisual stuff, and no more.
Maybe a modern display curved outward like old CRTs would help. Some ultrawide displays are curved inwards
I’ve been looking at this thread for a while and wondering what have you guys been smoking? Maybe I’m missing something but haven’t CRT Shaders been able to match how CRTs look for a very long time now?
Shaders don’t look ugly compared to a CRT. That’s just a crazy statement.
As for motion clarity, there’s BFI and CRT Beam Simulator for that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/s/pg1zzJKZ8f
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/s/0p7D2AvJgP
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/R423iTmhWG
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/s/VUyXMXKTSq
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/s/j5tihC7ntm
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/3Qi0VouplA
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/s/stqMvOL0Ie
They look better than real CRTs in many aspects. I think the crux of this problem is that most people do not browse this forum and aren’t really aware of the massive improvements in shaders and display capability in the last few years. The first wave of popular CRT shaders are over a decade old at this point.
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People will always be biased toward what they spent the most cash or the most time on.
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BFI is not a solution, it darkens the colors to the point where it’s impossible to balance them by increasing brightness/contrast, etc.
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Yeah, seen many retro videos, some even with poorly aligned scanlines. I also think that crt shaders are just fine, the problem, as it seems, is more or less with display response times.
4k resolution is more than enough for a great variety of mask patterns and great scanline representation.
Color reproduction shouldn’t be too much of an issue, maybe brightness where many shaders resort to mask mitigation to preserve it.
Have nothing against a true CRT experience. My humble oppinion is that retro gaming on a modern display can be just a fun and easy-to-setup experience. Folks like myself don’t even need to switch the chair/HW to do some retro stuff. 
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