The Big Ol' Retroarch Shader Thread

[Lordmonkus]

Nope they don't. The new Direct 11 and 12 drivers use the Slang shaders. The older DX drivers may work, I haven't tried them since they are for older hardware and operating systems.

[Suhrvivor]

Damn, that's most of the cool shaders I use.

I guess we'll have to wait until everyone jumps in in the Slang boat.

[Lordmonkus]

Most of the stuff should be ported over to Slang anyways though some hasn't because there is no good way to convert them since they rely on certain specific to CG code.

CG is being phased out and has been for a while, the shift is on to Slang now because it will be much more cross platform compatible.

[TakaraMiyuki]

Hi, I really love these shaders!

But there's one issue that I run into with a few of them (and this seems to be a common problem with advanced CRT shaders - CRT Royale has it as well). It tends to occur on games from the PSX generation (or later) that have darker colour palettes; Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears are classic examples of this.

Note the blobs of black and other distorted colours around the floor at the bottom and around the top of the ladder and adjacent wall (it's most visible if you zoom in). The top pic uses the Netrunner shader, and a shaderless version of this scene is below (there are a few compression artifacts now that I look at it, but you can still easily see the colour distortion):

You can also see it in this pic if you zoom in on the lower side of Aps and the wall behind him (this is CRT Royale):

In my experience, about half of advanced CRT shaders have this problem. I'm really curious to know exactly what causes it and whether there's any kind of satisfactory fix for the shaders that have it.

If it helps, I've made a couple of observations:

1. The shaders that don't have this problem usually have multiple blur filters near the beginning. For example, they often begin with linearize, blur10x10shared, blur9x9, blur10x10shared as their first four filters.

2. It can be eliminated in the shaders that have it, but only by turning the contrast down and the brightness up. That obviously brings its own problems.

For now we can all use the shaders that don't have the issue, but it would be very interesting to know why the issue exists at all.

Edited November 8, 2018 by TakaraMiyuki

[Zombeaver]

That's from gamma input/output levels. Most heavy CRT shaders will have multiple types/sources of gamma adjustment as well.

In Razorgirl, for example:

What looks right can kindof vary by content. You shouldn't see anything like that with my shaders but admittedly I can only test in so many scenarios with each one.

I've been meaning to put out an updated release of the pack, I've added a few new ones in my spare time.

No Shader:

Razorgirl-V2:

Neuromancer-V2:

Razorgirl-Vertical:

Neuromancer-Vertical:

[digitech]

Where do i get the latest version of Razorgirl?(V2 btw) Thanks!

[Zombeaver]

Nowhere, since I haven't released a set with those yet. I'll put one out this weekend though.

[digitech]

12 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

Nowhere, since I haven't released a set with those yet. I'll put one out this weekend though.

Thanks man, ill be waiting for it

[Zombeaver]

Okay, here they are:

Zombs Shaders 11-17-18.7z (newer version below)

New to this version:

Neuromancer V2
Razorgirl V2
Razorgirl Molly V2
Neuromancer Vertical
Razorgirl Vertical

I also made grain and no vignette versions of each of these.

[Zombeaver]

Here's one more for good measure. Neuromancer V3. I adjusted some of the scaling a bit and toned down the bloom a little. Looks pretty nice I think.

Zombs Shaders 11-17-18.7z

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

[digitech]

5 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

Here's one more for good measure. Neuromancer V3. I adjusted some of the scaling a bit and toned down the bloom a little. Looks pretty nice I think.

Zombs Shaders 11-17-18.7z

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

No Shader:

Neuromancer V3:

Thanks so much Zombeaver, going to try them right now, yeahhh

 

[Zombeaver]

I added a new shader - Snow Crash. This one's basically in between Razorgirl and Neuromancer V3. It has the bloom and slightly desaturated look of Neuromancer while not being quite as washed out. I also made a vertical version of it, as well as the usual no vignette/grain versions.

Zombs Shaders 11-20-18.7z

No shader:Neuromancer V3:

Snow Crash:

Razorgirl: 

No shader:

Neuromancer V3:

Snow Crash:

Razorgirl:

No shader:

Neuromancer Vertical:

Snow Crash Vertical:

Razorgirl Vertical:

[anontsuki]

Hey Zomb, love your shaders. I mainly use your shaders for PSX emulation, since that's the oldest console and games I own, but feel that they help them a lot in many situations.

I don't know if it's okay to make a request, but I figure I'd try in this forum where you update your Shader progress the most.

I've moved to using Beetle PSX HW libretro on Retroarch as my main PSX emulator, it works really well and appears to be the most accurate of hardware rendering emulators. The problem, though, is that Beetle PSX HW doesn't use the cg interface for shaders, it uses glsl instead. I've taken a look at the profiles you've made and the cg shaders they use and compared them to the glsl shaders available, either converted using cg2glsl or were manually converted. Most of the same shaders in cg appear to be in glsl, but, I don't think all of them are.

I was wondering if you could perhaps make your profiles work with the glsl side of things.

[Zombeaver]

I'm not sure what you mean by it not using "the cg interface". cg shaders definitely work just fine in Beetle PSX HW as that's what I use. None of these shaders (nor most CRT shaders in general) will work correctly if you're doing upscaling, if that's what you mean - they're designed for native resolution.

As far as converting them to glsl, no that's not possible. They depend on some shader passes that don't exist in glsl form.

As I said though, the shaders work in Beetle PSX HW. If you need me to send some screenshots, I can. All of the screens I've posted in here of PSX games are using Beetle PSX HW.

[anontsuki]

Oh... strange. My Beetle PSX HW doesn't accept CG or cgp shader profiles. It uses glsl only and I've tried way too many times. Can you send some screenshots of your configuration?

EDIT: Nevermind, it looks like Beetle PSW HW will use CG shaders, if using software rendering only, not hardware rendering. Not sure why Beetle PSX HW is being used if you're only using the software renderer. In hardware, only glsl and glslp is allowed.

Edited December 1, 2018 by anontsuki

[Zombeaver]

Because software rendering is the most accurate of the bunch (though admittedly more resource-intensive), and there's no reason not to use the HW core regardless of what you're wanting to use. It gives you the option to mess around with the other renderers/options if you so choose (you can even do this on a game by game basis if you want, with "content-specific core options") but is also functionally identical to the non-HW core if you just set it to use the software renderer. If you're running at native resolution, which you have to be in order for any of these to work correctly anyway, you should be using software rendering to do that. If you want to use a hardware renderer and upscale, they wouldn't work correctly regardless of whether they're CG or GLSL, because nothing would scale correctly either way.

[anontsuki]

=( Thanks.

[Zombeaver]

Sorry dude.

The same is true for pretty much any CRT shader. The scanlines/aperture grills have scaling values, and those are based on native resolution. They don't really work on anything above that. Typically you're just making the choice between a CRT aesthetic or an HD (upscaled) one when it comes to things like PSX and N64, not an "HD CRT" if that makes sense. If I'm actually upscaling something, typically I just throw an AA shader in top, if anything. I just prefer native (plus CRT shader) overall for this generation (and earlier) of games.

[anontsuki]

Could an HD Crt shader be possible or do they just not exist because people haven't really wanted to mix higher rendering and the crt aesthetic before? For those 2D games, the CRT shader is really nice, and that's probably how I'll use the shaders you offer, but for 3D games or hybrid games, crt+higher res, I thought, would be a sweet combination.

You're very in the know about shaders and things, so you probably know best that I could ask.

I have a feeling though, I'll probably have to forfeit the thought about the combination of higher rendering resolution and crt shaders, which kind of sucks.

[Zombeaver]

You might be able to do something with a high absolute resolution/scale specified in the shader preset, but some brief testing didn't yield anything good.

I think typically your only reliable option would be to do something like a scanline overlay and not an actual shader. Those do exist. You can find some in the overlays\effects\scanlines folder. None of them look all that great though because they're just extremely basic - because it's literally just putting the image of scanlines on top; but this also means it doesn't care what the scaling is of the content underneath.