The flicker seems to be reduced at higher refresh rates, so you can fix it via brute force (owning an expensive monitor, 480+) so I do see a use case for it, it just appeals to a niche segment, but this app already appeals to a niches (most are retro gamers simulating CRTs).

But anyways a version 2 of CRT beam will be released with many improvements in the future. Its good to have the framework laid out for now, so its easier to update in the future.

Its works flawlessly my monitor 144hz but I create a custom res with CRU and set it to 120+exact reduced and it works like it should but how to get rid of the screen artifacts that happen when i active the shaders ?

What kind of artifacts? You can go into Parameters and switch off some things like rolling scanlines.

What kind of artifacts? You can go into Parameters and switch off some things like rolling scanlines.

Iam already change the shaders to 120hrz safe and the artifacts already fixed, I found something really interesting my monitor 144hrz when I set it to 120hz and limit the game fps to 30 fps via RTSS then choose the sub frames to 4 (240hz) its actually give me the smoothness of 120hrz but with so much brightness flickering

What kind of artifacts? You can go into Parameters and switch off some things like rolling scanlines.

Is scan direction must be on in CRT beam ? when i disable it the rolling scanlines disappear

Thanks a lot! Quite disappointing you only got max 4 seconds out of it, but perhaps that happens with heavy-GPU games... when there's the game, Windows Capture and ShaderGlass all competing for one GPU, fair sharing is unlikely. I will try to check Street Fighter 6 myself at some point.
I didn't have a high-refresh monitor until yesterday so I have no idea how to set up Freesync, but I will eventually try that as well.

Thanks a lot! Quite disappointing you only got max 4 seconds out of it, but perhaps that happens with heavy-GPU games... when there's the game, Windows Capture and ShaderGlass all competing for one GPU, fair sharing is unlikely. I will try to check Street Fighter 6 myself at some point. I didn't have a high-refresh monitor until yesterday so I have no idea how to set up Freesync, but I will eventually try that as well.

I should note it's not that I only got 4 seconds out of it, it's that after 4 seconds you would start seeing cross talk happening that is image duplication where you then have to press CRTL Shift and A to disable and re enable to try and sync it back up its exactly as you mentioned in the readme file.

So that's what I meant when I said 4 seconds lol I mean like 4 seconds is when it works almost perfect HAHA

If anyone is friends with streamers having high-end dual-PC capture setups, that could provide data points for the best case scenario.

I was thinking it might also work with a PCIe capture card but its more pricey.

My concern with the main method is that it would be hard to get above 120hz on it, locking you to 60fps.

I'll talk to my streamer contacts though

Also - if I had 2 GPUs in my system, could I not just manually select ShaderGlass.exe to run on my second GPU? would that not also fix the issue?

You can do this via Graphic settings in windows, and other apps (like Lossless Scaling) even let you select which GPU the program is outputted from and which GPU runs the program itself

Yes it is something to potentially explore as well, I currently just take the default GPU but could override or use one for capture and one for rendering. What impact that would have on timing consistency is anyone's guess; it shouldn't be too much work so I might add this in the next iteration.
Re: your earlier comment, PCIe capture will probably also work (I don't have one so never tested...) Also at the moment I don't show all possible capture formats, SG automatically chooses NV12 over YUY2 over anything else; I should probably add advanced options in case that makes a latency difference (but this could also be tested using OBS for example).

Adding output GPU and preferred GPU options to the app makes it easier and more consistent than relying on Windows.

There are very GPU secondary GPUs though that are below 75w (meaning they draw from the PCIe lane itself, no need for a dedicated PSU) so this would be affordable and convenient if it works.

I have lots of friends with dual GPU setups so I can test this pretty quickly.

In the meantime though, here are some good secondary PCIe GPUs for this test (if anyone is reading this and wants to try)

AMD: RX 6400: https://a.co/d/cdjtSnl ($169)
Intel: Arc A310: https://a.co/d/4e1BK1d ($109)
NVIDIA: RTX 3050 6gb LP: https://a.co/d/bgD5XiE ($199)

Fantastic, thanks so much! Frame-limiting is definitely the way so that there's time left for Windows Capture and ShaderGlass to do their part, great to know RTSS worked well in this case.

Definitely! Consistent performance is key here. Looking at the task manager with shader glass running, it takes ~20% cpu and ~14% gpu with the desktop running at 1440p 240hz.

I tried to force shaderglass to run through my igpu using the graphic options in windows. At 1440p, it was a bit too much (100% usage). Resizing the window util the igpu could run kinda worked, but the window size was so small that i couldn't test if the latency was too much.

Awesome, thanks a lot, had no idea! Will link this up.

From my understanding oleds shouldn't have any retention at all. Thanks to the 0ms gtg. Instead burn in will just be slightly faster than normal.
I would hope someone with an oled can test it with a 3 hour movie or so. Testing image retention. It would be a good time to binge The lord of the rings directors edition trilogy. Lol. It would look closer to what 72hz projectors looked like.

Oh and of course to people reading this. Remember it's not just games that benefit. Although movies are designed for extremely slow motion. The only movies i can think anyone would truly benefit from are the early bruce lee movies. If video players even work at all.

upon further testing i actually prefer the crt beam sim because you can make it clearer in parameters and it doesnt give me nausea lol

been testing it for gaming and id say its pretty good. adds a bit of input lag so i wouldnt recommend it for competitive. but the motion clarity it gives specially at low brightness is pretty amazing. if it werent for the input lag and some mouse problems i had when the game was on fullscreen (had to put it on windowed) id say its pretty much perfect on the game i tested it (killing floor 2)

I will try some things in the next build like allowing tearing and I have a few more ideas around frame timing.
I think frame limiting the game using something like RTSS will also be mandatory because if GPU is contested there's no way to have low latency.

Thanks and sorry but these shaders only make sense on >60 Hz monitors.

if you need to test something in 60Hz regarding to that or another thing in the future hit me up i will be testing every single update in 60Hz and give feeback, i made it work by limiting game fps at 30 fps and shaderglass to 60 fps (dont know if it was needed) it worked fine was synced good sometimes flicker but i tested with HAGS ON so if i disable it will be better but it does work indeed thanks for your hardwork and turns 30 fps to 60 fps pretty good, i see some colocar banding close where the scan is i dont know if its intended hope this helps you in something

Its like black bar flashes horizontally throughout the screen and I wouldn't consider it random they were very consistent from start to finish throughout all content I tested until I started using 480hz then it became somewhat random.
I used steam launch options for some games and in game fps limiters for most. I did have to disable the Background Application Max Frame Rate in Nvidia Control Panel though.

Thanks! Have you tried switching the shader on/off using Ctrl+Shift+A to see if re-syncing helps get rid of these flashes (or made any difference at all)?
Also some testers had more success using RTSS rather than frame limiters, if you have that installed.

Yes I did switch the shader on and off numerous times and it does help tremendously because sometimes the flicker would get caught in this static state and doing this fixes it temporarily.
I definitely should've been using RTSS but unfortunately I didn't have it installed anymore.
If there's anything else you'd want me to test at 480hz to help with potential development do lmk.

Thanks a lot, every piece of information helps! I think once there's a new build (in a week or two perhaps) it'll be great if you'd have a chance to re-test then.

Yes once you have a 480hz source matching your 480hz display capabilities. Strobing it would make no difference as its not strobing anymore. Or as you can see on the crt beamed photo, it introduces crosstalk. Reducing the motion clarity.
From the non crt beamed photo, it is strange the 240hz and 480hz look the same. It's likely the shutterspeed on your camera is too low. You may need to manually set shutterspeed to 1/480 or up to 1/600 if you prefer.

I don't think more photos are needed though.

hags is not avalaible on my radeon card so cant test this sadly

I might have found something: disabling "Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling" made a night & day difference for me, flicker is almost completely gone. Windows 11: "Settings -> System -> Display -> Graphics -> Advanced graphics settings" then reboot. Please give this a shot!

unfortunately this option doesn't exist when using AMD Radeon cards

This is all that exists

A shame, try enabling windowed mode opt for good measure, I had them on.

A shame, try enabling windowed mode opt for good measure, I had them on.

Hey I tried Simple BFI and it works Amazing like wow just WOW how did you even integrate that BFI to begin with? only thing is you can feel the input delay latency no matter which mode you select but man this app is a work of genius.

https://github.com/wehem/desktopbfi

^ It has this BFI app but it's busted on OLED with horrid broken flicker, it somehow works fine on the XG2431 but causes image retention I actually bought an OLED just to use this app and it never worked not until YOU implemented BFI

The latency just sucks to be honest maybe its cause I have AMD GPU RX 6800 but not sure if its just in my head and there isnt any latency to begin with

Sorry I meant borderless fullscreen, exclusive one won't work. In RTSS create a profile for ShaderGlass.exe without an FPS limit, and set Global limit to 60.

A screenshot of a video off my phone the best I can do to show what I mean when it desyncs and causes chromatic abberation, as traditional screen capture seems to be rather... broken when using beamscan in any form.

Turning the function off and back on again seems to fix it most of the time for me, but it does always seem to come back at some point.

This was at 60fps locked via RTSS with shaderglass running at 240fps. (Chromatic Aberration is disabled in game as well, so its not the game doing it.)

Okay yeah it works great in CP2077, as long as you can keep your framerate at 60fps. I guess my issue must be an Unreal Engine thing.

Great to know about CP2077, thanks so much for testing!
Interesting point about the extra abberation; it might be because I don't currently sync game frames to subframe 1, so it's possible you'd get a different input frame between shader subframes. I guess it's a trade-off between quality and latency, perhaps I will be able to make this configurable.

Great to know about CP2077, thanks so much for testing! Interesting point about the extra abberation; it might be because I don't currently sync game frames to subframe 1, so it's possible you'd get a different input frame between shader subframes. I guess it's a trade-off between quality and latency, perhaps I will be able to make this configurable.

I realized why I didnt notice any flickering with CP2077, and its because CP2077 simply doesn't work at all. I tried recording in 240fps slowmotion, and the moment I click through Shaderglass to activate control in CP2077, the rolling beamscan effect goes away.

edit: if I launch shaderglass, set parameters, fullscreen, and THEN launch CP2077, it works. But if I disable and then enable beamscan, alt tab out, or remove fullscreen, it stops working (inside CP2077) entirely until I relaunch the game.

This is a bug in this alpha version, it does work in regular ShaderGlass. But I did some testing with tearing yesterday and the results are horrible, it doesn't make sense for strobing shaders. To reduce latency you can try running the game at high FPS (try an older game perhaps so there's GPU headroom for sync) and of course the more monitor Hz the lower it will be: 1 monitor refresh frame of added latency is theoretical minimum with this approach. But a lot has to happen within this one frame: Windows Capture needs to get game's frame, ShaderGlass needs to process it, and then DWM needs to display it... so the more juice, the higher chance it will make it.

Hey, thanks for chipping in, what is your GPU, OS, driver version etc.? You've tried disabling HAGS, didn't you? I tried Factorio just now (downloaded the demo) and it works pretty much flawlessly for me (at least the demo map). Zero flashing, there is a tiny bit of stutter but that might be more easily fixable than syncing (aka hard flash) issues. I'm playing 240Hz 1080p, my specs in the top post.
EDIT: And yes it's a great game for confirming motion clarity, it's so much better with the shader.
EDIT 2: And please try with lower resolutions and framerates, as well as with bfi-simple shader; it does sound like there might not be enough GPU headroom in your case.

No problem! I'm very excited to see how you continue to improve this
project and I hope our help can make sure we can find a way to add BFI to a
full release. I've got an RTX 3070 on version 32.0.15.8088. I did disable
HAGS, sadly I'm unable to play at 240Hz. I also tried Marvel Rivals and
while it did work, it felt like there were frame timing issues. My issues
could also be related to still using Windows 10, so no Max Capture Rate.
Hope we can all keep helping!

Computer config: RTX5090, AMD 9800x3D 8-core, 32GB DDR5 6000CL32. I seem to have one pending GPU driver update now that I checked and Windows11 should be the latest stable channel version. HAGS is disabled.

I try to experiment more with this because I am really enthusiastic of this. I have several PC games, mainly 2D scrollers, which are forcefully locked to 60fps so this would be really good for those.

I updated my original post also to add information of my rig.

Wow, TIL one can set GPU priorities via Process Lasso now. Promising!

not sure if this helped but i wonder if its because i dont have access to hags in the first place

Shader > Parameters > Scan Direction > 0.00
turns off the lines

oh thanks that does remove the scan lines. but sadly not the black stripe in the picture :(

oh thanks that does remove the scan lines. but sadly not the black stripe in the picture :(

Dang, sorry to hear it didn't fix the main issue. :(

Are you using a va panel?

Not sure if related but I am going to write my observations here anyway.

I noticed when running old game called Neverwinter Nights on my computer (rtx5090, 9800x3d, 480Hz oled) and while the game runs without any limiters about 650fps I still get these syncing issues with shader glass when I limit game with RTSS to 480Hz. There seems to be some oscillation with framerate +-1fps now and then. When I restricted the framerate to 240Hz or 120Hz these syncing issues disappeared and visually I got pretty stable looking image with shader glass.

It seems to me you need a MASSIVE amount of headroom in perf/fps to get stable CRT beam simulation with current implementation.

Thanks a lot, I'm packaging up a new alpha right now with improved timing logic - hopefully it will work better for you. Needles to day, it's still critical to either disable HAGS or use Process Lasso to set ShaderGlass' CPU and GPU priorities to Real-Time. But I'm really not seeing flashing on my setup anymore.

I'm very interested in the answer to that question if you were able to find out!

I'm very interested in the answer to that question if you were able to find out!

I asked a similar question in beta 3 after finding some more info on the blur busters site.