@TimZett said in General questions on applying shaders (video filters): The vertical shader I just took for testing purpose, because it shows something significant ;-) Currently I'm using the bilinear (blur) shader since I find the Atari games in all emulators way too blocky. I use CRT + smoother for everything. Then again, the only stuff I really play on RetroPie is SNES and PS1.

@TimZett I think @dankcushions posted a link (maybe in another topic) to the Shader docs in Retropie's documentation - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Shaders-and-Smoothing/.

Thanks for the reply! I installed Retroarch on my phone to see a bit of what you mean. Fewer shaders are available and the same shaders I use on my PC look different thanks to the phone's much higher PPI, and/or maybe some other factors. I suppose this would mainly apply to people playing on Windows or Linux on a 1080 - 4k screen. If you feel this question is of no use here, feel free to remove it.

Only the gl driver supports shaders, switching the video driver to sdl will not get you shaders. What shaders are you using ? What video card do you have - is it powerful enough to run those shaders ?

I think they are installed along with RetroArch, so whenever you update it, they'll be added back.

@megaJekan as said in your other thread, 480p is unnecessary for a pi3b+ and pcsx. psx emulation has been running full speed on pis since the pi2. if you're getting slowdown at 1080p and NO shaders, you have a system issue. as for curvature shaders - zfast should be full speed at 1080p on most games and is the fastest one available. they won't look at 480p as it's just not enough resolution for that effect to look good. it's not enough resolution for a non-curved scanline shader...

@skykid said in Shaders not displaying properly, weird issue / CRT-PI etc.: I have the backup of the retroarch.cfg I had before I replaced it with the dist version. To restore the console retroarch.cfg’s I should be able to pull them from a previous backup - but do I need to replace all the console files? You can easily compare the versions you have on your backup with what you currently have installed. The switching of the resolution between frontend and rom sounds like it was set prior in the runcommand, but I assure you it wasn’t! When I went in there today it was all totally vanilla. I never messed with anything in there before. 'in there' where ? How do you check it ? The video modes switch should be saved in the /etc/retropie/configs/all/videomodes.cfg file, you can also check there.

@AndersHP it's only slower if the shader causes you to lose frames, but i would guess that the 10% of games that you're losing frames with the crt-pi shader now, it will be less than 10% with the zfast-crt shader.. maybe 0% :)

Interpolation filter (evens out pixel scaling and scrolling) Shader 1 = Stock shader filter = nearest scale = 3x Shader 2 = Stock shader filter = linear scale = dont care

Ok thank you I get you now. I have a big collection of bezels that of got over the years but they are all curved. Where would I get some basic non curved ones. Thanks

@dankcushions - It looks like were unable to add comments to the issue. It shows a padlock and the message "You can't perform this action at this time."

Thank you for the support! And I agree with you... a couple of theme's would be elevated to a new level (like Pixel). Cheers,

No, Emulationstation doesn't have the ability to run shaders, that's something specific to RetroArch.

Yes I do but nothing change

I did give a try a few minutes ago. If I sit far away from my TV the shader looks okay but if I'm up close I can tell a difference. I don't know enough about the inner workings of shaders to say exactly why it looks worse up close, but it does. Hmmm.. I guess it's back to 1080p then as a nice shader is more important to me than marginally smoother menus.

Actually, thinking about this further, it might really be best to move the scanLineWeight * BLOOM_FACTOR out of the pow call. All this does is apply a nonlinear filter to the scanlines (why?), which should increase aliasing artifacts. Another thought I had considered was using a quadratic Taylor series approximation to the gamma filter given by x^a ~= x*(1+(a-1)(x-1)), which works pretty well as in this quadratic approximation. A cubic approximation is even closer (but may not be necessary), as shown. But I note that someone seems to have had a similar idea here with these new "zfast" shaders, so perhaps those are already doing this sort of thing...

@clyde Thanks.

Hey everybody, I have a quick update for those who want xBRZ-like quality from the Raspberry Pi. I ended up working around this by replacing RetroPie with Lakka, setting the full-screen resolution there to 1280x720 and using the 4xScaleHQ shader (in the scalehq directory). Everything runs smooth, tried with numerous games on various platforms, including MDK on PlayStation 1. No lag in the menus either, and the image quality is fairly close to xBRZ (though, of course, you can still tell the difference). I am quite happy with this solution. Another nice shader you can try is scalefx-hybrid.

@robmcc83 Only if it's supported by the emulator - but it doesn't seem so. There is a libretro core for Vice (C64 emulator - port of VICE for libretro) in the experimental packages section, you could try and install it.