Custom PPSSPP shaders

[LunaMoo]

@iota97
I really don't want to repeat one program multiply times just to fit all the settings which would not be used together anyway just to have color modifiers under one selection, through maybe less generic names for each group of color mod would be an improvement.

The same for video awareness, I don't want to run some lenghty code just to later disable it, when I can just skip doing all the work when the selected effects should be disabled. But with that the logic would also change in an undesirable way, I don't want to swith a bunch of starting effects off when in-game starts or video starts, but a different mix of them for video and in-game. With video awareness as separate effect you only could disable some effects which you place before other effects, when for example video starts playing or other way around, you could not make a different selection for both modes. nor use them further in the chain behind effects that should apply to either.




@CapedBaldy
The effects are enabled by default if you choose them from the list, but you need latest PPSSPP version(NOT release version, which is quite outdated currently) to use chain shaders with options. As far as I just tried the LCD one works fine under D3D11 in latest PPSSPP at least on Nvidia's Ampere gpu, in general gaming gpu's should be fine, but can't say that about intel or mobile gpu's since they are really awful by design, in the past I did tried to make as many effects as possible work on everything, but since we now have multiply gpu backends and post process shaders are auto-translated between them, it sometimes is really hard to make it work under all conditions especially when it's the translation that fails.

Code:

Auto Frameskip: On (1)

Why do you even care about maximizing graphics if you start by enabling frameskipping?>.> Even if it's on auto, I'd rather drop other settings than allowing the game I play to skip frames.

Code:

10x PSP
Vsync ON

Resolution above your native display resolution is useless without AA shader and if you have to use Vsync which is pretty awful relict of old times not something people use on modern displays I assume your display isn't some ultra high res one. It also doesn't benefit anything if the shader you want to use simulates old/bad LCD screens. You're making things unnecessary demanding and then using frameskipping to handle that... where's the logic in that?

Code:

Vertex Cache ON

Vertex Cache should be purely performance setting that just as often can reduce it as improve it, all depends on the game, preferably I would keep it off as in the past it was kind of buggy also the biggest difference in performance it does was in games where it made it slower.

Code:

Lazy texture caching ON
Retain changed textures ON

Those are dangerous speedhacks that can glitch out graphics and are really only boosting speed in limited selection of games and really even then only for low end hardware. You should not be using speedhacks especially when trying to obtain quality.

Code:

Hybrid + Bicubic

Imo this is the worst texture scaler available, it's basically xBRZ effect mixed with Bicubic, both of those effects do different things, one clears the graphics, the other blurrs it, you would get similar results by just using standard xBRZ with smaller scaling and it would be much cheaper.
Just because something is on the bottom of the list, doesn't mean it's best, dunno really why we keep 4 texture scaling algorithms when only xBRZ and Bicubic are different, hybrid barely differs from xBRZ and performs horribly when compared, and hybrid + bicubic are really countering each other while being even heavier.
When not using Vulkan you are limited to CPU texture scalers and there's no CPU that can scale textures in real time without ruining frametime causing stutters etc. that's possibly why you used frameskipping, but it's not worth it, especially when you plan to obfuscate everything with an old lcd shader.

Code:

Texture filtering LINEAR

Texture filtering is best left on Auto, forcing it to linear can cause glitches on 2D surfaces that otherwise look fine, either way it's not used on scaled textures.

Code:

Others not mentioned are off.

You should keep settings on default when not knowing what they do, saying not mentioned settings are OFF, can mean you disabled important feature like simulate block transfer.