Video Smoothing Yay or Nay?

rbaker

@GreenHawk84 I think the pi-CRT horizontal and vertical scan lines are essential. It's so good and authentic with no loss of performance.

GreenHawk84

Is there a way to enable smoothing per game in Arcade? Genesis and SNES are fine with it on for everything but I would like to possibly test games for performance in Arcade.

caver01

@GreenHawk84 I think you could create a file in the roms/arcade folder called ROMNAME.zip.cfg and put
video_smooth = true

and that game would load with the video_smooth option enabled.

Concat

Does video smoothing have anything to do with bilinear filtering, or is that a completely seperate retroarch option?

Googling ReteoArch "video_smooth" returns only retropie related items. Im just confused where it comes from. I cant find it as an option in the reteoarch menu either.

caver01

@Concat When I googled it I got a lot of stuff. For example, here's the line from a documented RetroArch config:

# Smoothens picture with bilinear filtering. Should be disabled if using pixel shaders.
# video_smooth = true

So, basically, your assumption is correct. It acts on the scaled video to "smooth" out the jaggies between the pixels. It appears to use bilinear filtering to do it. The algorithm is effectively taking an average of adjacent pixels to fill in between known pixels as the overall resolution is scaled. The opposite would be using pixel replication in which a scaled image simply enlarges the pixels (i.e. if magnification doubles, a given pixel becomes 2x2 of the same color, instead of a smooth transition to the next one). Replication simply makes bigger squares, but as the comment suggests, that approach works better when pixel shaders are used because they are typically built to do "something else" with enlarged pixles, like introduce scanlines, or bloom effects, or shadow masks, or RGB triads, etc., but in the end, it is matter of personal taste.

GreenHawk84

I really enjoy smooth. Except for super old games like Arcade Pac-Man/Donkey Kong and NES.

dankcushions

@Concat it's called "HW Bilinear Filtering" in the retroarch menu, but video_smooth in the raw retroarch config.

it's a pretty unsophisticated approach to solving the 'jaggie' problem but some like it. personally, I much prefer shaders.

Floob

I agree with dankcushions, I think shaders have a much better result than using the smooth option.
Or if you want something even less CPU intensive you could try overlays that have scanlines built in.

ProxyCell

I'm not criticizing anyone here but is there any other benefit to using these smooters/shaders/overlay-ers and such? The plain-jane look appears to be crisper than the original to me and overall a bit more "clean and clear"

GreenHawk84

@ProxyCell , I agree with "clear" without any video setting enabled but the sprites/details appear a lot more pixelated to me. The smoothing blends the pixels together but at the cost of "clear."

Concat

A lot of retro graphics took advantage of old school displays and cables. The best example of this is dithering. Here's a good article about dithering: http://retro-sanctuary.com/comparisons - differing.html

Raw pixel-perfect video on an LCD does take away some of the retro charm for some people. Shaders can mimick some of it, but there's often a compromise somewhere. FYI, you can update the shader pack in retroarch to get tons more shaders to try. Some practically make the system freeze though because they are so resource intensive.

That said, I really only use shaders for handheld emulators. At least so far. I like to put an overlay on the handheld and fit the screen in the window, then I apply a shader or two to mimick the terrible displays on the era... like the Game Gear :) Gameboy in particular needs a shader imo.

caver01

@ProxyCell Those of us who remember games--especially arcade games--that were played on old CRT displays often want to re-create that look using shaders with scanlines and RGB triads. The effect also applies to TVs from a time long before plasma/LCD HD. The nostagia angle is strong, but there is also the fact that the games themselves were designed for that hardware. The color choices made by the pixel artists who "drew" the sprites often used techniques like dithering described above, or a specific colored pixel in a specific spot to give the appearance of detail, knowing how it would look when blurred onto a low-resolution CRT display. Reproducing that authentic look is what most people who want to use shaders are after.

Speaking for myself, I would use a CRT if not for the fact that they are big and heavy. For me, the convenience of flat screens outweighs my need for authenticity, but the shaders (and to some degree, smoothing) at least brings the image closer to how I remember it for most games.

ProxyCell

@Concat Thanks for that link! I think I understand it a bit better now! I believe I will use it later myself :)

Floob

@ProxyCell Here is another view on the scanline approach:
http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/456719-best-crt-retro-games/

You can see examples here:

Scanlines

And a short video I made

caver01

That tested article is a nice one with some good images that make the case for some kind of effect to improve the image. Here is another that shows examples of using shaders to approximate NTSC images.

It's important to recognize that it's not all about nostalgia. The original artists had limitations at the time they were designing the graphics, but they knew how to work with what they had to produce nice visuals. Modern displays and resolution scaling actually breaks the original intentions of the design in some cases. Take the use of halftones for transparency, for example. This totally fails unless some kind of shader or smoothing is employed on modern displays.

ProxyCell

Thanks to all of you for the great examples! I was just having trouble seeing any significant difference before. I think I will give some "scanline" shaders a try.

GreenHawk84

@rbaker said in Video Smoothing Yay or Nay?:

@GreenHawk84 I think the pi-CRT horizontal and vertical scan lines are essential. It's so good and authentic with no loss of performance.

@Floob and @dankcushions , I really enjoy pi-CRT for all systems, but it does make it a little darker. Do you use pi-CRT for all systems as well? I tried the SNES scanlines but that one didn't do anything to the picture, I think it's broken.

rbaker

@GreenHawk84 It's crt-pi.gsl in retroarch that I use and everything looks great especially PS1 which looked horrible before. Tekken 3 plays and looks amazing for example and retroarch seems to know when vertical lines are needed.

GreenHawk84

@rbaker , yes that's the one I chose too. My only complaint is that it makes the overall picture a little darker. I wish there was a brighter option but it's still good.

davej

@GreenHawk84 said in Video Smoothing Yay or Nay?:

@rbaker , yes that's the one I chose too. My only complaint is that it makes the overall picture a little darker. I wish there was a brighter option but it's still good.

You can change some of the parameters to make the image brighter but they do have downsides.

Increasing MASK_BRIGHTNESS will make the phosphor mask emulation less obvious. If you're not bothered about phosphor emulation at all you could set MASK_TYPE to 0 which will disable it completely.

SCANLINE_WEIGHT governs how wide the dark lines are so decreasing it will brighten the image but makes scanlines less even.

SCANLINE_GAP_BRIGHNESS controls how bright the dark lines are. Increase this to brighten the image but the scanlines will be less prominent.

Increasing BLOOM_FACTOR will brighten the image at the expense of reducing the already limited bloom effect.

If all that fails, you can always turn the brightness up on your screen. ;)