The Big Ol' Retroarch Shader Thread

[Zombeaver]

Your account shouldn't be gone - you probably just need to do a password reset. It's part of the migration to the new forums. It's mentioned in big red letters at the top of the forum at the moment haha.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah there was the new forum migration yesterday and everyone had to do a password reset. But glad to see you here on these forums.

[solid12345]

lol the day I join there is a migration, funny

[Lordmonkus]

But you are here now You should find some people who will enjoy your shader presets a whole lot.

[Jason Carr]

Sorry for that solid. There was a short period in there where we were testing before going live with the new forums.

[Lordmonkus]

I was checking out some different shaders tonight and looking at some that I have never really looked at before (it's tough to go through all of them) and I came across this interesting shader in the CGP folder, its the "2xbr-hybrid-crt-hyllian" preset. I think this shader is an interesting balance of CRT scanlines without being thick but also giving a little bit (but not over doing) smoothing. Now I don't know if this is going to be a shader I will use all the time or will it be just another short term until I get tired of it like many of the smoothing shaders. I thought I would share a screenshot of Guardian Heroes for the Saturn because it is a game where it scales sprites in a weird way and sometimes scales them a bit large and pixelated. This shader actually smooths it out a bit, I also tried this shader on Genesis, SNES and Playstation games and it looks pretty good. It also doesn't overly darken the picture like many CRT scanline shaders. There is another interesting one in the "denoisers" folder called "crt-fast-bilateral-super-xbr" that has a simlar effect but I did not screen shot that one. Anyways enough of my rambling, here's the screen shot.

 

[niglurion]

The one I'm using at the moment is a custom one of another custom from this Analog Shader Pack v3. Forget which one, but I can search if anyone is interested. Darker than yours @lordmonkus, but personally, I don't like xbr filtering so... 

 

 

Edited August 16, 2016 by niglurion

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I generally don't like xBR filtering either. I normally use Royale-Kurozumi but I thought 2xbr-hybrid-crt-hyllian had an interesting look and being a shader preset tucked away in the CGP folder which tends to get overlooked I thought I would share it.

[AeronNL]

Great to see the new pack released!

i was womdering which shaders are are best for a 5:4 aspect ratio monitor! And which ones are certainly not?

also, i am using the onboard video of my MB (intel hd4400/4600), but when i try the GTU v0.50 shader for example, my games are in slow motion. Do i have to enable or disable other options in RetroArch or is this shader to much for the onboard gpu? Really like this shader so i hope that i can get it to work somehow.

Edited August 23, 2016 by AeronNL

[Lordmonkus]

I don't think your aspect ratio matters unless you are stretching games to wide screen. I run all my games in the correct aspect ratio and the shaders look great. Actual resolution matters more than aspect, higher resolution with higher pixels per square inch make crt shaders look much better.

The on board Intel graphics is unfortunately really weak and and not going to be able to handle most shaders and most definitely not the GTU or the heavier CRT stuff. If you want to try out something like the CRT-Hyllian-Fast or the CRT-Pi in the GLSL > CRT folder you may have some luck.

While emulation speed itself is CPU dependant, shaders put the load on the GPU.

To squeeze out some extra performance you can try turning on Threaded GPU in the video settings but don't expect too much. It's used to just get over the hump when needed. Like for example for me and Saturn emulation if I had CRT-Royale-Kurozumi is slowed me down to about 50 frames per second. With Threaded Video it put me back up to 60 but I also have a GTX 970 graphics card.

[AeronNL]

23 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

I don't think your aspect ratio matters unless you are stretching games to wide screen. I run all my games in the correct aspect ratio and the shaders look great. Actual resolution matters more than aspect, higher resolution with higher pixels per square inch make crt shaders look much better.

The on board Intel graphics is unfortunately really weak and and not going to be able to handle most shaders and most definitely not the GTU or the heavier CRT stuff. If you want to try out something like the CRT-Hyllian-Fast or the CRT-Pi in the GLSL > CRT folder you may have some luck.

While emulation speed itself is CPU dependant, shaders put the load on the GPU.

To squeeze out some extra performance you can try turning on Threaded GPU in the video settings but don't expect too much. It's used to just get over the hump when needed. Like for example for me and Saturn emulation if I had CRT-Royale-Kurozumi is slowed me down to about 50 frames per second. With Threaded Video it put me back up to 60 but I also have a GTX 970 graphics card.

Thank you very much for the clear explanation!

i quess i have to look for a dedicated graphics card then, or use more lightweight shaderds.

can you recommend a affordable graphics card perhaps?

it has to go into my Bartop so size does matter as well.

[Lordmonkus]

I'd say look for any card with 1 gig of DDR5 video ram and that should let you run any shader you want. Avoid any card with slow DDR3 vram.

[AeronNL]

On 24 augustus 2016 at 8:08 AM, lordmonkus said:

I'd say look for any card with 1 gig of DDR5 video ram and that should let you run any shader you want. Avoid any card with slow DDR3 vram.

Thanks alot mate, i will check things out and see if i can find something that fits and is affordable. Will post my results. 

[Zombeaver]

I've been doing some experimenting lately. I figured I'd share some comparison shots. CRT-Easymode-Halation and CRT-Royale-Kurozumi have been my go-to shaders for quite a while now, but I have to say - I'm really digging CRT-Hyllian-Glow. I've been using it for a few days now and I'm really liking it. It looks quite nice in a range of situations and I especially like the way it looks in areas of high contrast. It's bloomy but not too bloomy. It looks pretty good on 3D content as well - I was playing Dino Crisis with it and it looked quite nice.

I'm not sure what the deal is with the weird letterboxing going on in the screenshots as it's not present while playing, but you get the idea (probably has something to do with my viewport settings in RA). These really have to be viewed at full size for them to look correct.

EDIT: As some of these seem to be producing an internal server error (@Jason Carr, I'm not sure what that's all about - maybe a bug when posting large images?) I've included a zip of all of them too (which is probably easier for comparison purposes anyway).

Shader Comparison.zip

Tales of Destiny II - No Shader:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Calagiri:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-CGWG-Fast:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Easymode:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Easymode-Halation:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRTGlow_Gauss:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Hyllian-Glow:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Royale:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - CRT-Super-XBR:

Tales of Destiny II - CRT - GTUV50:

Tales of Destiny II - CGP - 2XBR-Hybrid-CRT-Hyllian:

Tales of Destiny II - CGP - CRT-Royale-Kurozumi:

Tales of Destiny II - Denoisers - CRT-Fast-Bilateral-Super-XBR:

Tales of Destiny II - Analog Shader Pack 3 - Professional Monitors - Sony BVM - RGB:

Suikoden II - No Shader:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Caligari:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-CGWG-Fast:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Easymode:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Easymode-Halation:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRTGlow_Gauss:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Hyllian-Glow:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Royale:

Suikoden II - CRT - CRT-Super-XBR:

Suikoden II - CRT - GTUV50:

Suikoden II - CGP - 2XBR-Hybrid-CRT-Hyllian:

Suikoden II - CGP - CRT-Royale-Kurozumi:

Suikoden II - Denoisers - CRT-Fast-Bilateral-Super-XBR:

Suikoden II - Analog Shader Pack 3 - Professional Monitors - Sony BVM - RGB:

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah Hyllian and Hyllian-Glow are very nice shaders. I used to use Hyllian before I found Royale, it's also fairly light weight on the GPU requirements.

[Zombeaver]

I feel like it's a good middle ground in terms of visual impact between Easymode-Halation and Kurozumi. I typically find Easymode-Halation to be a better all-rounder because it's not so dramatic whereas Kurozumi looks really great in some situations and really off in others (basically anything that isn't sprite-based). I think Hyllian-Glow fills a nice spot in between; I think it has a nicer glow effect than Royale too. It's still early but I could see it becoming my daily driver.

On another note, I've been working on my own deinterlacing shader for a handful of games that need it like Tobal no. 1, Tobal 2, and the Tekken games. It is blurry but there doesn't seem to be much of a way around that - your options are:

1) no blur with interlacing artifacts

2) no blur and no interlacing artifacts but with scanline and game UI judder

3) blurry with no interlacing artifacts and no judder

Obviously none of those are ideal, but option 3 looks better to me than the other two. I tried quite a few different shaders and they basically all fell into the first two categories. I feel like this could definitely still be improved as I'm basically just fumbling around, but it's a start.

CRT Deinterlacing.cgp

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah Kurozumi is certainly not a one size fits all shader by any means. For starters it looks better on resolutions greater than 1080, the thicker scanlines are too thick on 1080 and under resolutions.

I also don't use CRT shaders on 3D polygonal games, I prefer upscaling 3D games. Plus I don't play any 3D stuff from the 32 bit era at all, only N64 and newer.

[johnnyskullhead]

any advice on crt shaders new to this scene

 

[Lordmonkus]

What sort of video card do you have ? Is it a dedicated gaming GPU or is it an on board Intel (or similar) video ?

Currently my favourite CRT shader is crt-aperture found in the crt folder but easymode-halation and the hyllian shaders are still extremely good. Royale-Kurozumi is still a very good shader but it does require a decent GPU and it has an awful glow effect that is not so easily removed anymore but give it a try anyways and see what you think about it.

If you video is on board and not very powerful causing major slowdown with a shader give the crt-pi shader a try.

Like I and may others have said before there is a lot of personal preference and the exact look you are looking for in a shader. Some people want to replicate a consumer grade crt tv while others prefer the pvm \ bvm look with thicker scanlines.

[johnnyskullhead]

Its a Gigabyte Nvidia Gt 730 Graphics Card (2GB, DDR3, 64 Bit, PCI-E)

 

are the shaders accessed via launchbox or from retroarch directly

 

do you use the F1 to access quick menu ?

 

Thanks again