New shaders/presets thread

[Jararaca]

In the last weeks I spent my time optimizing my xBR shaders and others available.

I'm still in this process (it's really enjoyable! :P). I hope these optimizations will be available in the next emulator releases.

For now, here is a partial of my results:

Shader -------------Optmization

2xBR               -> 148% faster
3xBR               -> 161% faster
4xBR               -> 207% faster
5xBR               -> 289% faster
4xBR v1.1          -> 147% faster
4xSoft family      -> 105% faster
blur family        ->  57% faster
Super2xSaI         ->  14% faster
SuperEagle         ->  18% faster
Bloom              ->  25% faster
HQ2x               ->  49% faster
HQ4x               ->  41% faster
waterpaint-mudlord ->  54% faster
Lanczos16          ->  91% faster

A new shader will be available: 5xBR v1.1, which runs fullspeed with these optimizations.

[Jararaca]

This is the effect I'm getting with the new 5xBR v1.1 + Shapen-Lighter-Box + Linear Interpolation:



When I saw this effect last night, it blew me away. I stayed awaken testing several games until 4am.

[Jararaca]

BTW - could you take a stab at optimizing the CRT-cgwg shader?

This is a complex shader I don't have an understand yet. I've only made a blind port to cg. Eventually I'll try looking into it, after I'm done with my shaders. I'm stuck trying to find a way to optimize the v2 family without success.

Another thing - I see a lot of progress being made on the bSNES forums with lots of CRT/TV shaders by DOLLS and Cgwg - only problem is most are triple-pass or even 6-pass shaders. Anyway we can get them down to single-pass, or is multi-pass really becoming a necessity at some point in the PS3 emulators?

Yeah, I've seen that. As I said above, I don't have an enough understand of these CRT shaders to try bring them to only two passes yet.

[Jararaca]

BTW, I'm working hard on uploading all your latest shader versions to the trunk - including the shaders you optimized.

The xBR versions I sent to you already are outdated. When I'm done, I'll send new versions even faster.

[cacrosh]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but since you guys are discussing bnes, maybe I can ask my question here.

Im want to check out the custom border shaders for bnes, but cant find any type of guide on how to get started with it. Is there a tutorial floating around on how to setup it up (Win7-64bit)? Ya'll know which type of rom it uses?

Thanks in advance.

[tisurame]

BTW - could you take a stab at optimizing the CRT-cgwg shader?

If you change the inputGamma to 2 and outputGamma to 1.78 - the shader will run at fullspeed using scale 5x. This was an optimization by DOLLS itself.

And to avoid confusion, I think this shader should be renamed. The main modified version by DOLLS is called by him of "CRT.OpenGL" and the other version "CRT-simple.OpenGL".

The old version, using cgwg's original code, was originally called "cgwg-CRT-flat_v4" and now it's using just the name "CRT" in the current trunk. So, maybe this old version should be called "CRT-cgwg-flat" instead.

[Jararaca]

If you change the inputGamma to 2 and outputGamma to 1.78 - the shader will run at fullspeed using scale 5x. This was an optimization by DOLLS itself.

Though the image loses quality a bit. So it's important to let the original untouched for people (like me) who notices these differences.

[Jararaca]

I've made a CRT-cgwg-variation with the tweaks to inputGamma and outputGamma - so the original is still left untouched.

Thanks! This shader is already very optimized. The trick to throw calculations from fragment to vertex was already done. There's little room to optimize, maybe trying to change some floats to halfs, but need supervision if quality isn't lost.

BTW, I didn't test yet, but I've seen your lanczos16-HD is using 0.999 in vertex, so I think those artifacts will be present. In lanczos16 optimized I use 1.0 instead 0.999 in vertex to get rid of artifacts.

[Jararaca]

Alright guys - you will now be able to take screenshots from the XMB. I'm committing this to SNES9x PS3 in a minute - will have a lot of other stuff to backport to the other emulators now too.

Cool! So other emulators will get on par with Snes9x?

I will also look into getting JPEG decoding support in so as soon as Themaister gets the border shaders going, we can implement that in the PS3 emus too coinciding with SSNES.

Will this jpeg be an option to png or the only option? Wouldn't png be more suitable for this task as it is lossless?

Also in the works is the ability to save shader presets - it's already going to be in the next commit, but it's rather halfbaked at the moment - it's hardcoded to basically save the preset to USRDIR/test.conf - you're going to be able to enter a filename with the onscreen keyboard and it will then save the preset in the Preset folder. I will even offer the option of changing the title for the preset later on - so you can do as much from within the emulator as possible.

One thing for complete control of presets would be the ability to define the scale aspect (4:3, 16:10, 5:4, etc). This is because some presets only works ok with a specific scale aspect, otherwise the result won't be satisfatory and the user won't know what's wrong with that particular preset.

[subcon959]

It's up on the site for anyone that wants to check out the screenie feature.