Pixel Shaders for RetroArch 3D Cores

RetroArch got its first 3D core recently in the form of TyrQuake and it seems most of the existing pixel shaders either look unimpressive or don't work at all. Thankfully, shaders written for Pete's OpenGL plugin for PSX emulators are easy to port to RetroArch's XML format and they seem to generally work well enough.

Click here to download all of the shaders covered in this post.

No Shader (for comparison)

A Lovely Bloom

One of the few conventional shaders that still functions as expected, this one looks really nice, and the screenshot doesn't really do it justice. It gives light sources a nice bloomy glow that softens things up a bit. 

 HDRTV

This shader saturates colors somewhat and adds faint scanlines. It has been around for a long time (it was one of the original shaders available for bsnes when it first got pixel shader support) but the scanlines weren't visible on 2D sources, so I was surprised to see them here.

NV+MSAA

This shader uses the "natural vision" algorithm to do some color adjustment with added post-proc anti-aliasing.

Cartoon

This one darkens the image too much to be very useful in an already dark game like Quake but may be good for future cores that have brighter games.

Edge Detection

While not necessarily practical, this shader draws a line at each color intersection to produce a cool, old-timey effect.

Scale4xHQ

One of the only scale/interpolation shaders that has any noticeable effect, this one is a bit blurry for my tastes but it evens out a lot of the jaggies.

Scanline3x

I'm a sucker for scanlines and these normally crummy-looking scanline filters I made a while back actually look pretty nice here. (Note: I think I got the 3x and 4x mixed up; 3x should have fewer, larger scanlines than 4x)

Scanline4x

Themaister Waterpaint Scanlines

While the effect isn't as pronounced as with 2D cores, this shader does some smoothing with scanlines and ends up with a sort of screen-door effect that nevertheless looks pretty good.

CPU Filters

Some of the bsnes-style CPU filters work, but not that well. The NTSC variants all perform their normal functions, but the the image is off-center and cuts some things off, as pictured. The scanline filters work pretty well, too, though they're sort of hard to see. Interpolation filters like HQ2X seem to have no visible effect, and SuperEagle crashed my game :/