it depends on the shaders you are using now. for example, assuming you use 240p with your new CRT, a scanline shader would be pointless because a) 240p already shows scanlines on a CRT and b) 240p is not enough vertical resolution to allow fake scanlines to be rendered. shaders that adjust the colour or fidelity of the image may or may not be useful or provide the desired effect, depending on what they are doing and how you are connected to your CRT.

@mitu OK thanks

To reply to my own post with more info...I believe this to be a bug with the Mednafen core and/or Retroarch. Possibly moreso Retroarch Using the Vulkan renderer worked great for a while then all the sudden mid game my battle swirl went away and all i get now is a black screen with this as well. Same with the GL renderer as mentioned before if this is what you're reading. I replicated the same scenario with another device as well... The swirls work fine initially then stopped working entirely for some unknown cause however i was reading this issue which had a very valid workaround: Github-beetle If on both OpenGL and Vulkan you want your battle swirlies and they just stopped working start the game, toggle ANY option on and off in Retroarch then resume the game and everything is fine. I cant believe i had not even tried that even by accident... Edit: I ended up recording a video of this along with what actually works as a fix. Keep in mind there are NO core overrides and this is with stock retroarch settings which use OpenGL.

The shader is already present in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/shaders/retropie/ in a default installation. You need to use the RetroArch RGUI to load it, using the Shaders -> Load Shader preset menu. How are you trying to load the Shader ? Here's a handy showing you how to load a shader.

@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."

@XARAMBIT That looks amazing! Great work!

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.