Image retention on IPS monitor after playing Galactic Attack

[Restart_Point]

I just had a couple of goes on Galactic Attack on Saturn on an IPS flat monitor (Iiyama brand) and when playing a different game straight after I noticed the unmistakable ghost image of the Galactic Attack score / credits etc info in the next game! This screen is new, and previously I played a lot of GAttack on an old LCD TV, and it has never happened on that one.

It wasn't my RetroTink 5x-Pro or my Saturn retaining the images internally, I turned the whole lot off but they are still there. So now I have left the screen off for a while. This has only just happened at the time of typing this, is there any chance this is permanent damage on the monitor? I just googled a little that said this tends to happen more with flashing / interlaced elements in old games on flatpanels, and I've noticed before that GAttack has that interlaced shimmer all the time on the score / credits etc. I definitely think that GAttack has caused this more so than any other Saturn games, I played a few hours of other games (Batsugun, Kyukyoku Tiger II Plus) previously today and they did not cause any issues. The scary thing is this happened after a relatively short go on GAttack, 30 mins or so.

Is there some 5x setting I can use to avoid this happening again? (I've had basic requirements from the 5x till now and not needed to change the settings much - so any advice is appeciated)

[Syntax]

Its the tink 5x bob deinterlace thats doing it to the screen.
Its not permanent, it will go away after awhile.

[RocketBelt]

If its the same as my TV, then if will fade away after some hours of normal TV. Supposedly any constantly and rapidly flashing area will trigger it, on some kinds of IPS panel. If I understand correctly, bob deinterlacing flashes a line of the image up every other line, every other frame. So the entire panel is constantly flickering on and off as fast as it can.
My TV gets a lot of use, kids cartoons, daytime TV, a lot of 4:3 gaming etc., but I've only seen image retention after bob deinterlacing, which I now don't use.
Edit- forgot to mention it the brightest areas of the flickering image that get retained.

[Restart_Point]

Thanks both, i'll check out the de-interlacing settings on the Tink. I dont think it's necessary for all games but Galactic Attack definitely promotes the effect more than other games I have played, as far as I have noticed so far. Maybe its because the score bar is particularly bright

[Udderdude]

I've never heard of this and I hope none of my IPS displays suffer from this .. is there any way to tell aside from seeing if it temporarily burns in?

[Restart_Point]

I have tried different settings for de-interlacing on the 5x, so far the image retention is still happening, but as said before, Galactic Attack (aka Layer Section etc) is still the only game that has ever noticeably caused it, which a total bummer as it's one of my absolute fave Saturn games. I am very curious why only on this game. It happens with the score / credits bars and obviously one factor is that these are static elements in the game, but I have played many other Saturn games with static score bars etc and none of those have caused it.

Does anyone know if there is a way to completely turn off deinterlacing on the 5x, via a specified setting? I am not an expert on such things but far as I can see deinterlacing is integral to what the (and any?) upscaler does so I don't know if you can ''turn it off" as such.

[Guspaz]

Some form of deinterlacing is required, at some point in the chain, because your TV is not an interlaced display. Before I continue, I'll preface this by saying, make sure you're on the latest firmware revision of the RT5X, v3.0, because the feature set and interface has changed dramatically since the launch firmware, which they still ship with from the factory. Once you're on the modern firmware, you can find lots of documentation on the various options here: https://consolemods.org/wiki/Retrotink5x

Bob deinterlacing causes a flickering effect that can cause image retention on IPS panels. You can mitigate this by using the RT5X's motion adaptive deinterlacing, which alternates between bob and weave on a per-pixel basis depending on if there's motion in that part of the screen. It will result in less flicker. Weave deinterlacing may also mitigate the issue, because while there are very obvious interlacing artifacts, it's not actually flickering. Finally, you can try blend deinterlacing, which has no flickering or artifacting at all, at the cost of a softer image as you lose half the vertical resolution. And if all that fails, you can always shift the deinterlacing from the RT5X to the TV by setting the RT5X output resolution to 480i, though this will add significant lag.

All that said, I looked at some footage of Layer Section/Galactic Attack, and it seems to be a 240p-in-480i game. The RT5X has a special processing mode intended to essentially reverse this interlacing and restore the 240p image. This is the "bob offset" setting. To use this, set the RT5X to bob deinterlacing, and then adjust the bob offset setting to align the two fields, at which point you're essentially bypassing both the interlacing and deinterlacing. This doesn't work for 480i games in general, only for 240p games that are forced to output as 480i, but at least from the tiny amount of video footage I looked at, that seems to be the case for this game?

[orange808]

Double strike is worth a try. Be aware that simply removing the field offset may not deliver a good result. You've got to try it out to see.

If the image appears to tremble, it's because the console is using a flicker filter and there's not much that can be done.

[Guspaz]

I don't think the Sega Saturn supported a flicker filter, though I'm not sure about that.

[Restart_Point]

This doesn't work for 480i games in general, only for 240p games that are forced to output as 480i, but at least from the tiny amount of video footage I looked at, that seems to be the case for this game?

I cant find any confirmation of exactly how Galactic Attack outputs, but it does "look" like interlacing is inherrant in the game, thats all I can say. I actually found someone posting about this exact game causing image retention on the first Switch port too!

So far I have been unable to stop it happening on my IPS, including all the different deinterlacing options on the 5x (v3.00) and changing the bob offset

[Restart_Point]

I have discovered that I must have the 5x's triple buffer enabled to stop the image retention happening in Galactic Attack. If Gen Lock or Frame Lock is enabled, it makes no difference what settings are used for deinterlacing, and the image retentions always happens, but never happens with triple buffer enabled. Annoying, but it is only for this one game, frame lock and gen lock has never caused the retention on my monitor for any other games I have played so far.