The quest to bring shaders experience to everybody

Each of the graphic models in the Mega Bezel Commodore Pack comes with presets. Actually, lot of them! The first public release, named "Release Candidate 1", counts a whopping 34 distinct presets for each of the 7 Amiga models, leading the count to a total of 238.

Some friend on Libretro Forums asked why do I really need that much: to me, the whole point is inclusiveness. My idea about “design for all” is to bring complex shaders experience to everybody: the final user just have to sit, choose a configuration and happily play his games.

First critical issue is performance: during internal tests with fellows creators, we noticed complex shader may result too heavy for older GPUs. One possible solution was to leverage on the 'Simple Presets' feature to create specific performance profiles that could activate complex effects on advanced ones and keep a shiny and fast experience for low-end machines.

Preset nesting method

There was an actual extensive research and development behind the definition of EXTREME, ADVANCED, STANDARD, BASIC and POTATO performance profiles: each of them adds something to build a unique experience, even going beyond the vanilla experience with the use of advanced filters like MDAPT, taking care of pseudo trasparencies, and ScaleFX, introducing hi-quality smoothing throught resolution downsampling.

Table of profiles with performance and features

As you can see, increasing features equals more load on GPU, while the CPU stays constant: by using a mix of calibrated effects, pre-baked graphics and luck, the resulting load on my GTX 1660 Super ranges from 7% of POTATO profiles to 32% of EXTREME profiles, leaving the door open to lots of gamers eager to play their old games with a revised CRT experience.

At this point I’m pretty sure that Mega Bezel framework flexibilty can become one of the exclusive ‘selling points’ to get new audience and creators attention to the Libretro community. One thing is sure: once you try that, you can't go back!