Applying HLSL Pixel Shaders to Win32 Screen Capture

Question

A little background: I'm attempting to make a Windows (10) application which makes the screen look like an old CRT monitor, scanlines, blur, and all. I'm using this official Microsoft screen capture demo as a starting point: At this stage I can capture a window, and display it back in a new mouse-through window as if it were the original window.

I am attempting to use the CRT-Royale CRT shaders which are generally considered the best CRT shaders; these are available in .cg format. I transpile them with cgc to hlsl, then compile the hlsl files to compiled shader byte code with fxc. I am able to successfully load the compiled shaders and create the pixel shader. I then set the pixel shader in the d3d context. I then attempt to copy the capture surface frame to a pixel shader resource and set the created shaders resource. All of this builds and runs, but I do not see any difference in the output image and am not sure how to proceed. Below is the relevant code. I am not a c++ developer and am making this as a personal project which I plan on open sourcing once I have a primitive working version. Any advice is appreciated, thanks.

SimpleCapture::SimpleCapture(
IDirect3DDevice const& device,
GraphicsCaptureItem const& item)
{
m_item = item;
m_device = device;

// Set up 
auto d3dDevice = GetDXGIInterfaceFromObject<ID3D11Device>(m_device);
d3dDevice->GetImmediateContext(m_d3dContext.put());
auto size = m_item.Size();

m_swapChain = CreateDXGISwapChain(
    d3dDevice, 
    static_cast<uint32_t>(size.Width),
    static_cast<uint32_t>(size.Height),
    static_cast<DXGI_FORMAT>(DirectXPixelFormat::B8G8R8A8UIntNormalized),
    2);

// ADDED THIS
HRESULT hr1 = D3DReadFileToBlob(L"crt-royale-first-pass-ps_4_0.fxc", &ps_1_buffer);
HRESULT hr = d3dDevice->CreatePixelShader(
    ps_1_buffer->GetBufferPointer(),
    ps_1_buffer->GetBufferSize(),
    nullptr,
    &ps_1
);
m_d3dContext->PSSetShader(
    ps_1,
    nullptr,
    0
);
// END OF ADDED CHANGES

// Create framepool, define pixel format (DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM), and frame size. 
m_framePool = Direct3D11CaptureFramePool::Create(
    m_device,
    DirectXPixelFormat::B8G8R8A8UIntNormalized,
    2,
    size);
m_session = m_framePool.CreateCaptureSession(m_item);
m_lastSize = size;
m_frameArrived = m_framePool.FrameArrived(auto_revoke, { this, &SimpleCapture::OnFrameArrived });
}

void SimpleCapture::OnFrameArrived(
Direct3D11CaptureFramePool const& sender,
winrt::Windows::Foundation::IInspectable const&)
{
auto newSize = false;

{
    auto frame = sender.TryGetNextFrame();
    auto frameContentSize = frame.ContentSize();

    if (frameContentSize.Width != m_lastSize.Width ||
        frameContentSize.Height != m_lastSize.Height)
    {
        // The thing we have been capturing has changed size.
        // We need to resize our swap chain first, then blit the pixels.
        // After we do that, retire the frame and then recreate our frame pool.
        newSize = true;
        m_lastSize = frameContentSize;
        m_swapChain->ResizeBuffers(
            2, 
            static_cast<uint32_t>(m_lastSize.Width),
            static_cast<uint32_t>(m_lastSize.Height),
            static_cast<DXGI_FORMAT>(DirectXPixelFormat::B8G8R8A8UIntNormalized), 
            0);
    }

    {
        auto frameSurface = GetDXGIInterfaceFromObject<ID3D11Texture2D>(frame.Surface());

        com_ptr<ID3D11Texture2D> backBuffer;
        check_hresult(m_swapChain->GetBuffer(0, guid_of<ID3D11Texture2D>(), backBuffer.put_void()));

        // ADDED THIS
        D3D11_TEXTURE2D_DESC txtDesc = {};
        txtDesc.MipLevels = txtDesc.ArraySize = 1;
        txtDesc.Format = DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM;
        txtDesc.SampleDesc.Count = 1;
        txtDesc.Usage = D3D11_USAGE_IMMUTABLE;
        txtDesc.BindFlags = D3D11_BIND_SHADER_RESOURCE;

        auto d3dDevice = GetDXGIInterfaceFromObject<ID3D11Device>(m_device);

        ID3D11Texture2D *tex;
        d3dDevice->CreateTexture2D(&txtDesc, NULL,
            &tex);
        frameSurface.copy_to(&tex);

        d3dDevice->CreateShaderResourceView(
            tex,
            nullptr,
            srv_1
        );

        auto texture = srv_1;
        m_d3dContext->PSSetShaderResources(0, 1, texture);
        // END OF ADDED CHANGES

        m_d3dContext->CopyResource(backBuffer.get(), frameSurface.get());
    }
}

DXGI_PRESENT_PARAMETERS presentParameters = { 0 };
m_swapChain->Present1(1, 0, &presentParameters);
... // Truncated

Answer 1

Shaders define how things are drawn. However, you don't draw anything - you just copy, which is why the shader doesn't do anything.

What you should do is to remove the CopyResource call, and instead draw a full screen quad on the back buffer (Which requires you to create a vertex buffer that you can bind, then set the back buffer as render target, and finally call Draw/DrawIndexed to actually render something, which then will invoke the shader).

Also - since I'm not sure whether you already do this and just stripped it from the shown code - functions like CreatePixelShader don't return HRESULTs just for the fun of it - you should check what is actually returned, because DirectX silently returns most errors and expects you to handle them, instead of crashing your program.