Polys *too* sharp?

[andykara2003]

Hi guys - I'm new here and have been blown away with everything about this emulator. Some of the texture packs are insanely good too. I was wondering though, does anyone agree that in some games the image can almost look *too* sharp for the original low poly graphics? It's like the seams where the polys connect/join and the polys lining the outer edges of things almost become too exposed and it can look a touch janky.

Is there a way to smooth off this effect? The only way I can think of is to run at a lower resolution and use lots of antialiasing to smooth of those edges but perhaps that's not ideal - not to mention that the accepted way to play these games seems to run at as high resolution as possible.

[MayImilae]

Outside of custom models, there isn't really anything that can be done about those errors. It's just errors that have always existed in the game that the higher resolutions are bringing to light. The only solution really is to just... fix the errors. And that's hard!

[andykara2003]

Nice one Of course these 'errors' were nicely masked by CRT's shadow mask/aperture grille back in the day. No worries, it's not going to stop me from getting a PC for this emulator - I just can't deal with the Wii's anamorphic 16:9 image on a flat panel so this is still an excellent alternative I think..

[DaRkL3AD3R]

It's because of a few things. First this console is built around analog video output signals and being displayed on a typical CRT 640x480 television. At that resolution and analog signal through RCA, you can expect lots of fuzziness and blurring to hide the polygon edges. Additionally, some GameCube games employ actual hardware antialiasing which Dolphin does NOT do. This means there's nothing you can do aside from using higher resolution and antialiasing forced to smooth the edges, or output at native through to an analog CRT and hope for the best.

[andykara2003]

I didn't know that the Gamecube has hardware anti aliasing! I would love to know more, do you have any more details?

[MayImilae]

Eeeehhhh, don't be too excited by that. Only like two games actually used the hardware antialiasing!

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Those games were made by Factor 5. Its an obscure hardware feature no one else uses, of course they'd use it!

[andykara2003]

Cool nice one - is that the rogue squadron games?

[andykara2003]

Just a thought - does anyone know of any CRT style shadow mask shaders for Dolphin? The right kind of shadow mask would hide these too-sharp polygon edges just as well as a real CRT shadow mask I think..

EDIT: - sorry guys, just saw the advanced CRT shaders in sweetfx. 

[wowfunhappy]

This is going to be anathema to some people—but the "solution" is to run the game at lower resolutions, closer to what they were originally designed for. You can then clean up aliasing with a post process blur filter.

[andykara2003]

That's what I was thinking actually - a nice CRT filter over a slightly lower resolution image (say 2xIR) might be perfect.

My problem now is to get advancedCRT and the rest of Sweetfx working. I can't find the image now but I saw a screenshot of PCSX2 with advancedcrt and the look was wonderful - quite subtle but smooths the image perfectly. The mask is perfect for a 480p image style rather than a 240p style. Any help would be really appreciated..