madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[Ver Greeneyes]

Originally Posted by Dogway

...

That was the most condescending drivel I've read in a while.

[James Freeman]

Careful Dogway you are pushing it, and in his own home.

[Dogway]

okey okey, looks like my appreciations are not welcome here (for some unexplained reasons -right KhR0N1K?, right Ver Greeneyes?, right madshi?-) nonetheless it's my ONTOPIC opinion, so please, everyone, stay ontopic.

[Ver Greeneyes]

If you don't think your post sounded condescending, you should learn some language comprehension. But sure, I'll stop feeding the troll.

[aufkrawall]

Originally Posted by KhR0N1K

i do not agree.

What a pure trolling. I suggest to completely ignore him.

Well, hopefully a more constructive opinion:
In image doubling, maybe it should be named "double luma axis resolution" etc.?
E.g. in games rendering, you usually refer to the total amount of pixels when having a multiplicator. Of course you can define doubling the one way or the other, but giving a hint that it's meant for each axis sounds like a compromise to me that should make fans of both types content.
Maybe it would reduce confusion, as image doubling options are probably not easy to understand when you are new to madVR.

[Akeno]

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting on the forums but I've been following this thread and reading threads on the forum for a few months. First off, thank you so much for all of your work madashi. You and the other developers on this forum helped awaken my interest in film and home theater playback.

With that out of the way, I have a few questions regarding madVR:

1. How much does the monitor affect visual changes in rendering?
   I've played around with most, if not all, of the options in madVR but I can barely see a difference in some options. e.g. I see almost no difference between bilinear and jinc chroma upsampling or error diffusion and no dithering unless I lower the bit depth to something ridiculous. I mainly use a 15" laptop IPS display so I don't think it's the WORST choice out there but I just can't see a difference even staring closely.
   
2. Will smooth motion work well with 23.976>60hz conversions or should I let reclock speed up video to 24fps and let smooth motion blend it to 60?
   
3. SuperRes options are adjustable numerically rather than listed in presets.
   Updated to 88.18 but the madVR config remains unchanged. Not that it really matters. With NNEDI3, I saw absolutely no difference in SuperRes off and SuperRes 10pass 1.0 strength. It was more noticeable when using jinc or nedi.
   
4. Previous versions of madVR had a slight increase in render times with d3d11 enabled but the current version actually lowered render times by a few milliseconds.
   Not really sure what d3d9 and d3d11 are but I also wouldn't expect performance to change when updating versions.

Sorry for the laundry list of questions but I'm really appreciative of everything on this forum.

[baii]

Originally Posted by Akeno

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting on the forums but I've been following this thread and reading threads on the forum for a few months. First off, thank you so much for all of your work madashi. You and the other developers on this forum helped awaken my interest in film and home theater playback.

With that out of the way, I have a few questions regarding madVR:

1. How much does the monitor affect visual changes in rendering?
   I've played around with most, if not all, of the options in madVR but I can barely see a difference in some options. e.g. I see almost no difference between bilinear and jinc chroma upsampling or error diffusion and no dithering unless I lower the bit depth to something ridiculous. I mainly use a 15" laptop IPS display so I don't think it's the WORST choice out there but I just can't see a difference even staring closely.
   
2. Will smooth motion work well with 23.976>60hz conversions or should I let reclock speed up video to 24fps and let smooth motion blend it to 60?
   
3. SuperRes options are adjustable numerically rather than listed in presets.
   Updated to 88.18 but the madVR config remains unchanged. Not that it really matters. With NNEDI3, I saw absolutely no difference in SuperRes off and SuperRes 10pass 1.0 strength. It was more noticeable when using jinc or nedi.
   
4. Previous versions of madVR had a slight increase in render times with d3d11 enabled but the current version actually lowered render times by a few milliseconds.
   Not really sure what d3d9 and d3d11 are but I also wouldn't expect performance to change when updating versions.

Sorry for the laundry list of questions but I'm really appreciative of everything on this forum.

1. chroma upscaling is known to have little effect on real life material.
2. edit: nvm thought you said SVP, that wont make a difference.
3. people are working on it
4. does not matter ~~

most of the stuff go back to "judge with your own eye".

[Ver Greeneyes]

Originally Posted by Akeno

Previous versions of madVR had a slight increase in render times with d3d11 enabled but the current version actually lowered render times by a few milliseconds.
Not really sure what d3d9 and d3d11 are but I also wouldn't expect performance to change when updating versions.

A difference in rendering time between d3d9 and d3d11 is somewhat surprising, but the different path may be putting your GPU in a different power state, or it might be an artifact of how rendering times are measured. Unless you can confirm that d3d11 allows you to use settings where you'd be dropping frames with d3d9, I wouldn't pay too much attention to rendering times.

[Akeno]

Originally Posted by baii

1. chroma upscaling is known to have little effect on real life material.
2. edit: nvm thought you said SVP, that wont make a difference.
3. people are working on it
4. does not matter ~~

most of the stuff go back to "judge with your own eye".

1. I've tried it out with CG and anime material as well but even then I can't see a difference.
2. So I can keep reclock set to original speed?
4. Considering the render times are noticeably different, I would think that it does matter. My question was more about why they would be slightly different though rather than should I set d3d11 on or off.

Judging things for myself is good advice but I always go mad whenever I see people write about how they can notice huge differences in various options while I can't see any. Gives off the feeling that my eyes are broken.

Originally Posted by Ver Greeneyes

A difference in rendering time between d3d9 and d3d11 is somewhat surprising, but the different path may be putting your GPU in a different power state, or it might be an artifact of how rendering times are measured. Unless you can confirm that d3d11 allows you to use settings where you'd be dropping frames with d3d9, I wouldn't pay too much attention to rendering times.

It does make the difference between dropping frames every few seconds with 30fps material using NNEDI3 16neurons. d3d11 gives me a few milliseconds of buffer room to prevent that.
On the note of GPU paths: This might have to do with an optimus issue but plugging in my laptop to my TV results in extremely high render times unless I restart my system. Despite render times being higher than the frame interval though, there are no visible dropped frames nor does madVR report dropped frames or presentation glitches.

[har3inger]

These are mostly my opinions, but I think the gist is mirrored by many others in this thread:

1. A good number of IPS displays are not true 8 bit and use static dither built into the logic of the display to "upscale" from 6 bit to 8 bit. Sometimes it'll look better if you set the display bitdepth for dithering to the true (6 bit, if applicable) depth of your monitor, sometimes it looks better at 8, and this depends entirely on your own configuration. You may need to test this empirically on your end. Usually you want to feed a monitor 8 bit info (even if it's 6 bit) because the dither levels decided by madvr may be different from your monitor, which can cause way more noise than necessary. Unless you know for sure your monitor supports 10 bit color or higher (almost nothing does in a laptop), don't go higher than 8 bit.

Chroma quality differences in live-action film are going to be very hard to distinguish on any monitor unless you are trained well in what to look for. The best way to visualize differences is to try to find pure colors (red is best) on pure black background. Credit rolls and opening logo scenes are best for this. Otherwise, you can set chroma to nearest neighbor and look for the heavily aliased areas to identify places in the image where a chroma upscaler makes a lot of difference. As a sort of related tidbit, since it's hard to tell the difference between chroma upscalers, many people like to get some performance back by setting the upscaling to bicubic 75 AR.

2. Smooth motion should works just fine with 23.976->60. At least, it does for me. However, if you're able to test with reclock on and off already, it won't hurt to try and see what you like better. IIRC, reclock does cost a noticeable chunk of computation time, so it may be worth it to skip it and use some more obviously visible madvr features if you're bottlenecked by your laptop hardware.

3. I have no idea how the math of the current SuperRes algorithm works, and it's still very much in testing. IIRC madshi said that he'll be replacing those numerical entries with presets at some point in the future.

4. D3D9 and D3D11 are the same as the DX9 and DX11 that you see for games. They can enable new features, but by themselves shouldn't cause any differences in an image result. D3D11 needs a newer GPU (which you probably have if you have an IPS screen laptop) and enables 10 bit output. Otherwise, it really doesn't matter if you use D3D9 or D3D11. Go with whichever one runs faster unless you need 10 bit output for a 10bit or higher screen.

Edit: RE: your TV plugging issue: Probably some sort of OSD bug, where madvr gets confused about the stats when dealing with switchable graphics. If you don't see frame stuttering or weird jumping, it really shouldn't matter what the stats say. TBH, madvr support for laptops and switchable graphics isn't quite perfect (intel + AMD in laptops has been reported to not work with openCL or nnedi3) so just report whatever bugs you see and move on.

[Akeno]

Thanks for the information, har3inger. I didn't know about the display bitdepth. Is it true even though the iGPU settings state that the monitor is 32bit?

For chroma upscaling, is this true even for CG or anime material? I personally can't see any difference even with extremely colorful and simple anime material unless I push it up to something like 4x zoom.

Regarding smooth motion: a personal preference, but I prefer to use smooth motion with a 60hz display rather than switching the refresh rate to 24hz. The judder is just too obvious at 24hz and smooth motion alleviates it slightly. I suppose an alternative would be to use SVP but I don't know how resource intensive it would be.

[James Freeman]

D3D9:

D3D11:


*Sorry for the huge pics.
Shouldn't they shrink like on some other forums?

As you can see, I have a 30% faster rendering time with d3d11, if d3d9 is the base.
Or a 44% slow down with d3d9, if d3d11 is the base.
This is in P8 state (GTX660, 324MHz both gpu and memory clocks).
D3D11 definitely got faster in the last few releases.

When the GPU is in P2 state or full clock speeds, the rendering times are less than 4ms on both.
d3d9= 3.7ms
d3d11= 3.4ms

[Ver Greeneyes]

Interesting! Well, I'm certainly not going to complain.

[Ceremony]

Again, can someone help me with my AMD APU issue: The GPU clock does not increase while running madVR, thus I cannot higher quality scalers such as Jinc or resolution doubling:

[har3inger]

Originally Posted by Akeno

Thanks for the information, har3inger. I didn't know about the display bitdepth. Is it true even though the iGPU settings state that the monitor is 32bit?

For chroma upscaling, is this true even for CG or anime material? I personally can't see any difference even with extremely colorful and simple anime material unless I push it up to something like 4x zoom.

Regarding smooth motion: a personal preference, but I prefer to use smooth motion with a 60hz display rather than switching the refresh rate to 24hz. The judder is just too obvious at 24hz and smooth motion alleviates it slightly. I suppose an alternative would be to use SVP but I don't know how resource intensive it would be.

8 bit display == 32 bit in Windows display. The 8 bit means 8 bits per color channel, for RGB, totaling 24. There's also an alpha (transparency) channel that also has 8 bits, adding up to 32 bit color. Yeah, it's a weird naming convention.

The chroma differences are more obvious with crisp edges in anime or CG works, but again, hard to discern unless you know exactly where in an image to be looking. A lot of chroma information is well obscured by the luma channel, as it's supposed to be. Better scaling generally shouldn't give you more vivid colors, but more accurate edges between colors and more accurate saturation in thin or small bits of color. Go with a recommended algorithm like jinc3, bicubic75AR or super-xbr 100 if you're in doubt.

24 hz material (or 23.976, difference should be unnoticeable) on a proper 24 hz display should be perfect and theoretically better than 60fps and smooth motion. If you're seeing judder, something is not working like you're expecting in your setup. May as well just stick with smooth motion because it's so amazing. The only artifact smooth motion introduces is very slightly increased ghosting from motion in a scene/camera pans.

You'll find a lot of the answers to questions here basically come down to "I dunno, play around with the settings and pick something you like best. After all, you're the only one you're deciding settings for" .

Originally Posted by Ceremony

Again, can someone help me with my AMD APU issue: The GPU clock does not increase while running madVR, thus I cannot higher quality scalers such as Jinc or resolution doubling

Force GPU clocks to max for mpchc through CCC if you can. You might need to rename the mpchc executable to something else for this to work (I had to--ATI is stupid and locks certain applications to lower power states or iGPU and takes away user control). You can also try turning off hardware decoding (DXVA) in LAV filters. This tends to lock clocks for AMD gpus to lower clocks as well. In general, GPU power states are entirely controlled by your OS and GPU driver settings and how they handle your video player (NOT madVR, which runs inside the vid player). There's likely nothing madVR can do to force certain GPU power states, so unfortunately, don't expect support here if troubleshooting doesn't work.

[MS-DOS]

Originally Posted by Ceremony

The GPU clock does not increase while running madVR,

It has nothing to do with MadVR. Disable DXVA in your video decoder and try again.

[Akeno]

Originally Posted by har3inger

8 bit display == 32 bit in Windows display. The 8 bit means 8 bits per color channel, for RGB, totaling 24. There's also an alpha (transparency) channel that also has 8 bits, adding up to 32 bit color. Yeah, it's a weird naming convention.

24 hz material (or 23.976, difference should be unnoticeable) on a proper 24 hz display should be perfect and theoretically better than 60fps and smooth motion. If you're seeing judder, something is not working like you're expecting in your setup. May as well just stick with smooth motion because it's so amazing. The only artifact smooth motion introduces is very slightly increased ghosting from motion in a scene/camera pans.

You'll find a lot of the answers to questions here basically come down to "I dunno, play around with the settings and pick something you like best. After all, you're the only one you're deciding settings for" .

Just so I'm clear, I have correctly assumed that my monitor is, in fact, a 8bit display based on the 32bit setting. If the settings said 24bit, the monitor would be a 6bit display and likewise 40bit would equate to a 10bit display, correct?

Unfortunately, my TV doesn't support any interpolation settings when connected to a computer. I'd like to try out the cineflow options on it like what another user has posted but oh well.

On a side note: What's the bilateral option? I remember madashi saying it works well on some content but horrible on others.

[Ceremony]

Originally Posted by MS-DOS

It has nothing to do with MadVR. Disable DXVA in your video decoder and try again.

Using CPU decoding did nothing to counter the issue, improve performance, increase clockspeed or anything else along the lines. The issue persists.

However, it is still a madVR issue. I highly doubt madVR is at fault here, however, there clearly is a compatibility issue with my setup: madVR needs performance, desperately, but fails to reserve just that...

Bottom line: How do I fix this?

[huhn]

reinstall the driver and delete everything that can change or control the clock of your GPU there are so many possibilities.

after that try to rename your mpc-hc exe.

BTW. your screen shows a huge issue with the buggy and most likely windows 7 desktop composition.

[ryrynz]

Originally Posted by huhn

BTW. your screen shows a huge issue with the buggy and most likely windows 7 desktop composition.

With Windows 10 basically weeks away just prepare for the upgrade and do a fresh install..