Started experimenting with RA shaders tonight

[DOS76]

I've been playing around with the shaders in RA tonight and I must say I don't know that I've found anything that jumps out at me yet but I'm going through them and checking them out I saw one that I wouldn't want to use all the time but was kind of cool looking called Waterpaint if you are looking for something that closely imitates the original look of the game then you won't like this shader. Currently I've been using one of the Anti-Aliasing shaders reverse-aa and I'm thinking it is ok. I'm hanging in my basement so I'm on my slim desktop without a graphics cards so for this PC the CRT are not going to work I tried 3 or 4 and they were all incredibly laggy. The Retro I tried Pixellate, Bead and a few of those but I like to play in 16:9 regardless of how the games were intended to be displayed and it was a bit much for me. There are so many options and some of them are just so strange like Mudlord Old TV and MonoChrome both were basically unplayable. I'm sure I'll be experimenting with this for a while looking for the perfect shader to my taste.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, there's lots and lots and lots of presets. You'll find something you like eventually. :P

[DOS76]

I'm up in my room now and I'm pretty impressed with how CRT Hylian looks on this PC.

[SentaiBrad]

I haven't bothered with CRT or Scanline shaders, but from the screenshots I saw 6 months ago they looked pretty good compared to others.

[Lordmonkus]

For a decent CRT shader for low end systems look in the GLSL shaders under CRT for the CRT-Pi. Its designed for the Raspberry Pi so it's obviously meant for low end systems. I use this on my laptop with crap graphics and it runs well. The Hyllian-Fast is fairly performance friendly as well as far as CRT shaders go. Hyllian is probably the 2nd best CRT shader if Royale is looking like ass for you. Lottes and Geom are ok as well but not as good IMO. I am heavily biased towards the CRT shaders but if I Had to pick the best of anything that is not a CRT I would go with either Pixellate or one of the Scalenx stuff. Everything else is just way too out there and niche for every day use, again IMO. Pixellate is obviously gonna give you the best looking raw pixelart look but scaled up, it has a very sharp and clean look. The scalenx stuff is probably the best of the smoothing shaders if you want that look.

[Walrus13]

Hi, I have an unpopular setup with my shaders. I use them to smooth out visuals and remove pixel edges...i know it is terrible lol :). Anywho, even as a child of the 80's and being extremely nostalgic with games, i just dont get scan lines, but to each their own. I use a filter called sabr, really knocks the pixels out cold when ran at 2x, then i run a blur filter to take away some of the harshness, to me that is perfection, but it really is personal taste.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea pretty much. I'm just a pixel art kind of person. I make it Minecraft (recorded time lapses of them too) and make them in Perler. I just love me some pixel art. :P

[fromlostdays]

I have an unpopular setup with my shaders. I use them to smooth out visuals and remove pixel edges...i know it is terrible lol :). Anywho, even as a child of the 80's and being extremely nostalgic with games, i just dont get scan lines, but to each their own. I use a filter called sabr, really knocks the pixels out cold when ran at 2x, then i run a blur filter to take away some of the harshness, to me that is perfection, but it really is personal taste.

Nothing terrible about it. I'm the same way. I ran Saber 3.0 Nearest X2 for a long time. Now I run Xbr + CRT (Its in the Xbr/Legacy folder) Nearest X2. For me this leaves no visible scanlines and it gives you the same cartoony look as Sabr, but looks overall better. For N64 (at 2x resolution) I find some straight Advanced AA X2 is pretty good. For PSX consider that XBR HYBRID is a series of shaders that combine XBR smoothing with Antialiasing. At 2X resolution I also add one pass of Sai. Also an unsung hero of shaders: Natural Vision, which really makes the colors pop.

[DOS76]

What is the difference between the glsl and cg shaders? I was curious as I see the shaders are named the same but with the glsl or cg extension so is there much difference between them or does pixellate look basically the same in glsl or cg? I just went through a ton of the glsl ones and any one I liked I saved a preset so now I will test them out some more without having to dig through the folders every time.

[Drybonz]

They are basically the same, but different in the way they run under the hood, as far as I understand it. A lot like the HL and GLSL in MAME. I usually go with the GLSL. I have also found that some CG's don't work for certain cores, and vice versa. I actually like the EasyCRT shader a lot. Hylian is good too. You have to tinker with it a bit to find one you like.

[Lordmonkus]

GLSL is the more cross platform set of shaders for use on Mac, Linux and phones. The CG is an Nvidia technology and is not meant for other systems other than Windows. According to the Admins over on the Retroarch forums they are working on a new shader architecture based around GL and the new Vulkan api. If you notice the CRT-Pi shader I mentioned above is not available in the CG format since it was written for the Pi specifically and of course that being a Linux based system it has no CG support and no need for CG rewrite. @Walrus13 As I was saying to Brad in another thread the old pixel are was designed from the start with full knowledge of the final output was going to be output to a CRT with the scanlines and shadowmasks. Because of this the artists took those qualities of the display into account and used those very scanlines and shadowmasks to creat illusions of smoothness and more shades of colour than were actually there. Whatever shader people choose is pure personal preference and for me all those other non CRT shaders looked neat to me at first but they grew old and looked better or worse depending on the game. Once I started looking at the good CRT shaders there was no going back. A lot of emulators have a simple scanline effect built in and it does achieve some of its goal to break up the pixels it is a cheap effect and not a very good implementation. When you get into the really good CRT shaders such as Hyllian and Royale these shaders really show what a good high quality CRT TV of the time could look like. Also keep in mind that the higher end CRT shaders such as Royale are not meant for 1080 and under resolutions. The pixel density just isn't there to show the effect properly, you need to have at least 1440 or preferably a 4k display to really see them shine. I made the jump up to 1440 recently and Royale just came alive compared to 1080. Also I am not looking to recreate the crappy old TV and RF connection we grew up with the early 80's. I am looking to recreate the high quality CRTs and RGB signal that were around before the modern displays took over. There is a reason that the real hardware guys are going for the RGB modded systems and Sony Trinitron TVs or dropping 300$ and up on 20" PVMs (other than for zero input lag as well).

[eric]

Q: about the shaders , how does one set up the shaders in RA so you can use the N M hot keys to try the different ones on the fly. also any links to good shader packs? thanks .

[SentaiBrad]

I didn't know you could swap shaders in RetroArch that way? I would assume it's in the Hotkey settings in the input tab. Not the settings for Controllers in RA, but the system functions. RA should also ship with Shaders, but the way it really works you can't just swap them by key unless it's an auto-accept process with the keys. I cover shaders a bit in some of the tutorials if you are curious, they're a section in some of them. Give those a watch if you want a live demo. Otherwise, next week (I have this week off actually) will be a more inclusive tutorial on the SNES, but the other stuff I teach is applicable to other systems including the shaders.

[DOS76]

Yeah the settings is in the HotKeyBinds I have it set to use right dpad as next and left dpad as previous but I'm afraid to just start changing them like that but so far even when shaders are not fast enough or that some display in black screen (not many but I came across a few) I haven't had any crashes.

[SentaiBrad]

Ah well that's good. Thank you for the clarification Derek, I was just guessing.

[DOS76]

Ok I just tried crt-pi on one of my tablets and it can't handle it so how do I go back to no shader or the default shader that RA starts out with.

[SentaiBrad]

Turn the Shader Passes to 0 then apply changes.

[DOS76]

Thanks Brad

[SentaiBrad]

No problem.

[Lordmonkus]

eric said Q: about the shaders , how does one set up the shaders in RA so you can use the N M hot keys to try the different ones on the fly. also any links to good shader packs? thanks .

I'm not sure how to easily cycle through the shaders other than the hotkeys, I have never bothered to try out the feature personally even though I know it is in there. As for shader packs the best packs already come from the Retroacrh guys themselves, just use the updater to update the CG and GLSL shaders. They update it in a fairly regular basis and if you really want to keep up on what they are doing head over to the Retroarch forums http://libretro.com/forums/ and check in the shaders section. Sometimes someone is working on something and you can download WIP versions of packs or individual shaders people are doing. In general though when something gets good enough to use it gets integrated into the official shader packs through the downloader. One place that I found to be an interesting read but no real downloads is the http://shmups.system11.org forums. This is where I found the Kurozumi settings for Royale which I used for a long time. The discussion is a bit technical at times but I found it really helpful to understand some of the inner workings of CRT shaders in particular.