madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[surgical]

I scanned through the users guide (https://docs.sony.com/release/KDL32FA600-EX301-EX400-EX401-EX500-EX501.pdf) and although no mention was made specifically of a 'full range RGB' setting I did note the presence of an analogue 'VESA' RGB compliant connection for a PC which implies full range RGB. Now this may not be the case with HDMI unless so noted. In the end most all displays utilize RGB to the final display processing stage.

I have a run-of-the-mill (KDL40w3000) 8 YO 40" Sony Bravia and it provides selection of either full range or limited RGB under "Video Options">"RGB Dynamic Range" for each of the HDMI inputs. YMMV :)

Thanks for your comments
Yes............................. I'd also taken into account that information but , unfortunately , don't have that option ; I mean , it doesn't allow me the space color change in the HDMI inputs . What's more, it doesn't indicate what space color are using that HDMI input............... simply says "not available for the current input"
Greetings

[xabregas]

Some more NNEDI3 vs super-xbr doubling test. Sorry about the image size, I don't know how to crop always exactly the same pixels.
However, I could do this in future if someone explained this to me. :)
720p -> WQHD, Jinc3AR chroma

super-xbr 100 is sharper than NNEDI3 64, but ringing gets more obvious and lines aren't as clean.
NNEDI3 64:
http://abload.de/thumb/nnedi364t9pa0.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=nnedi364t9pa0.png)

super-xbr 100:
http://abload.de/thumb/super-xbr100x4p8n.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=super-xbr100x4p8n.png)

With AdaptiveSharpen of 0.2 as an upscaling refinement for NNEDI3, the image still looks natural and clean, but is sharper than super-xbr 100 without sharpen:
http://abload.de/thumb/nnedi364as0.2ur0zpyu.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=nnedi364as0.2ur0zpyu.png)

Edit: as a reference, the original frame:
http://abload.de/img/frame6ro6g.png

I also notice the worse line reconstruction of super-xbr e.g. with clothes of news speakers.
Even though it's "just" doubling, the advantage of NNEDI3 is already noticeable.

I see better detail retention with super-xbr, in the windows, no matter the ringing, sometimes ringing is part of the source. Windows have much more detail

[aufkrawall]

True. But without comparison, one will probably never notice this, contrary to the unstable lines of super-xbr.

[RyuzakiL]

I see better detail retention with super-xbr, in the windows, no matter the ringing, sometimes ringing is part of the source. Windows have much more detail

And that's the reason why i stick to S-XBR, I think S-XBR is the most HTPC friendly algo among the rest.

In my opinion when building an HTPC Performance should come first before quality, since running Full NNEDI3 renders gpu to run at its fullest and depending on the gpu cooler, noise problems. And thankfully S-XBR was created to cater for many HTPC's that don't have powerful gpu's. and It seems NNEDI3 consumes alot of GPU load for less obvious improvement in picture quality over S-XBR which oozes with efficiency and better detail retention.

Unless one enjoys looking at static picture just to notice a minute improvement of NNEDI3 then by all means. enjoy staring.

[ryrynz]

I see better detail retention with super-xbr, in the windows, no matter the ringing, sometimes ringing is part of the source. Windows have much more detail

Prefer NNEDI3 in that example, more natural.

[aufkrawall]

Unless one enjoys looking at static picture just to notice a minute improvement of NNEDI3 then by all means. enjoy staring.
Unnecessary trolling, the differences can be seen in motion instantly.

[leeperry]

After quite a bit of fiddling today, I think there's no free lunch to be expected. Many sources come with ringing to begin with and yeah, if you magnify it it will become more obvious...sxbr digs more than NNEDI3 IMHO and as a result also rings more, I currently run sxbr50 with SR(3 passes, 0.65 sharpness, 0.01 softness) and it's working really well IME in mVR .15, OTOH 0.00 softness looks too edgy to my taste.

[baii]

Suggestion: Could we have a checkbox for image enhancement to just enable it if no luma upscaling is applied?
This would be useful to prevent sharpening of sharpening artifacts when also using it as an upscaling refinement.
I think it would be neat to help NNEDI3 with AdaptiveSharpen, but I don't want it combined AdaptiveSharpen of image enhancements, which on the other hand is neat to fight chroma blur a bit.
A workaround is to make profile with source and target dimension as scalefactor seem to be a little wonky. Since the profile can't use parameter compare to parameter now(say source width<target width), it can be a little cumbersome, but you can make it work.

Sent from my 306SH

[madshi]

I'll reply to all your posts later. For now I would just like to share a new test build, using a tweaked SuperRes algorithm:

http://madshi.net/madVR8816b.rar

SuperRes image quality should generally be slightly better than in the official v0.88.16 build, furthermore I've added an anti-ringing filter which should noticeably reduce ringing artifacts introduced by SuperRes. I hope that the anti-ringing filter will allow us to use algo 2, which is my favorite algorithm, but didn't work well due to the added ringing artifacts in v0.88.16. FWIW, if I had to decide on final SuperRes configuration right now, it would be this:

- algo = 2
- use alternative color space = off
- low: strength=0.5; passes=1
- medium: strength=1.0; passes=1
- high: strength=1.0; passes=2
- ultra: strength=1.0; passes=4

Would like to have your feedback about this. If you believe that the above settings are a totally bad idea, please let me know. Ideally with a small sample which shows that other settings work much better. Or if you like my settings, please let me know, too. Thanks!

[Warner306]

When image doubling, does chroma upscaling happen before chroma doubling?

In that case, would the chain look like...

chroma > super-xbr (chroma upscaling) > super-xbr (chroma doubling)

Yes, it works just like that.

[AngelGraves13]

What kind of ringing or aliasing would an anisotropic filter produce? Assuming it could be used for upscaling chroma...

[e-t172]

Hey, quick question. I am planning on building a rig based around a UHD screen and a 980Ti (not just for movies). Of course, since there is little UHD content in the wild I intend on primarily watching upscaled 1080p movies. Up until now I didn't care about upscaling too much with my current config, but of course in this project upscaling quality will be paramount, since my viewing angle will be optimized for UHD (i.e. the picture will be much bigger), not 1080p. Is NNEDI3 1080p -> 2160p feasible with a high-firepower GPU such as the 980Ti or is it too extreme still? Is NNEDI3 good enough to provide high quality presentation of 1080p upscaled to 4 times the typical effective picture size?

[Anima123]

it would be this:

- algo = 2
- use alternative color space = off
- low: strength=0.5; passes=1
- medium: strength=1.0; passes=1
- high: strength=1.0; passes=2
- ultra: strength=1.0; passes=4

Would like to have your feedback about this. If you believe that the above settings are a totally bad idea, please let me know. Ideally with a small sample which shows that other settings work much better. Or if you like my settings, please let me know, too. Thanks!

As I said, madshi, would you please keep at least passes and strength options, and use 3-4 button for default values? In that way, everyone would be happy, without compromise your intention of make madVR easy to use that much.

Edit: Right now, my optimal settings for 1024x576 -> 1920x1080 of SuperRes is 2-passes with strength 0.40, algo 1.

[MS-DOS]

I'll reply to all your posts later. For now I would just like to share a new test build, using a tweaked SuperRes algorithm:

http://madshi.net/madVR8816b.rar

SuperRes image quality should generally be slightly better than in the official v0.88.16 build, furthermore I've added an anti-ringing filter which should noticeably reduce ringing artifacts introduced by SuperRes. I hope that the anti-ringing filter will allow us to use algo 2, which is my favorite algorithm, but didn't work well due to the added ringing artifacts in v0.88.16.

What can I say? It's amazing. Even 10 passes don't ruin the image to my personal taste. It's definitely not what I'd use, though.


FWIW, if I had to decide on final SuperRes configuration right now, it would be this:

- algo = 2
- use alternative color space = off
- low: strength=0.5; passes=1
- medium: strength=1.0; passes=1
- high: strength=1.0; passes=2
- ultra: strength=1.0; passes=4

Would like to have your feedback about this. If you believe that the above settings are a totally bad idea, please let me know. Ideally with a small sample which shows that other settings work much better. Or if you like my settings, please let me know, too. Thanks!
Either these or just a "passes" option. "High" settings is what I've been using since .16
I always disliked sharpening in general, but this new SuperRes does wonders combined with S-XBR :)

[AngelGraves13]

Hey, quick question. I am planning on building a rig based around a UHD screen and a 980Ti (not just for movies). Of course, since there is little UHD content in the wild I intend on primarily watching upscaled 1080p movies. Up until now I didn't care about upscaling too much with my current config, but of course in this project upscaling quality will be paramount, since my viewing angle will be optimized for UHD (i.e. the picture will be much bigger), not 1080p. Is NNEDI3 1080p -> 2160p feasible with a high-firepower GPU such as the 980Ti or is it too extreme still? Is NNEDI3 good enough to provide high quality presentation of 1080p upscaled to 4 times the typical effective picture size?

Wouldn't recommend it. It's very taxing and much too sharp. I even find Jinc for upscaling to be too sharp as it makes 720p look overprocessed when upscaled to 1440p. I'd go with Jinc for Chroma and Bilinear for image upscaling. That's just my opinion though.

[madshi]

Edit: Right now, my optimal settings for 1024x576 -> 1920x1080 of SuperRes is 2-passes with strength 0.40, algo 1.
In my tests 10 passes with strength 0.10 looks almost identical to 1 pass with strength 1.00. So 2 passes with strength 0.40 should look almost identical to 1 pass with strength 0.80. If you disagree, please show me a screenshot where 2 passes with 0.40 look clearly better than 1 pass with 0.80.

This is extremely important, because different strength values don't cost performance. But 2 passes is exactly twice as slow as 1 pass.

[AngelGraves13]

I can't find a good reason to use SuperRes. It's just too sharp. I'd rather have a bilinear filtering pass on the image to soften it up to hide source artifacts.

[Anima123]

I just tried between 2 passes, strength 1.0 vs. 4 passes, strength 0.50 with madVR latest test build, result as follow:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/heo0bzw64tbph2y/madVR-test6-2pass-strength1.00.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x94w0few0dfkedg/madVR-test6-4pass-strength0.50.png?dl=0

For a moment I almost doubt that I am looking at the same picture. I would say, that madshi has changed the SuperRes's behavior quite a lot from the original.

The original idea is that the images should converge as passes increasing.

Do you have any comment on that madshi?

[aufkrawall]

Neat, new SuperRes has an AA effect, even though the image gets sharper (e.g. with that "high" preset).

But very interesting: The effect of SuperRes is totally different between super-xbr and NNEDI3: It seems to be much stronger with the latter one. Is this by design?

I still think I don't need SuperRes anymore now that AS can be used with NNEDI3.
At least I don't have performance for both, and I really rather enjoy NNEDI3 (you probably guessed it ;) )

super-xbr 75 quadrupling + "high" SuperRes:
http://abload.de/thumb/super-xbr75quadsrhighpwx5g.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=super-xbr75quadsrhighpwx5g.png)

NNEDI3 64 + super-xbr 75 quadrupling + AS UR 0.2:
http://abload.de/thumb/nnedi364super-xbr75quy8x5d.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=nnedi364super-xbr75quy8x5d.png)

[xabregas]

Unnecessary trolling, the differences can be seen in motion instantly.

I agree, i can easily see the differences betwenn algo in motion. For me NNEDI3 seemed the better option for chroma until super-xbr come. Speaking of gpu intensive, super-xbr is better. The PQ with NNEDI3 only gets much better with 64 neurons which is too intensive for me ~38ms rendering. I get ~4ms rendering with super-xbr ffs. I see no amazing differences from NNEDI3 32 neurons and super-xbr 100 for 1080p video on 1080p screens ;)

[aufkrawall]

I see no amazing differences from NNEDI3 32 neurons and super-xbr 100 for 1080p video on 1080p screens ;)
I even can't distinguish between 1080p -> WQHD NNEDI3 64 and 1080p -> WQHD Jinc3 AR (at least with the samples I watched). I think the default settings to only double resolution with scaling factors >= 1,5x totally make sense.

[madshi]

Recommend me some settings for video playback, please.
Please use one of the many madVR guides/tutorials out there. Your question is too general to give a good answer to, and this kind of question gets asked all the time.

Honestly, the differences between the algorithms and the color space on HQ content @ 4K or WQHD are insignificants.
And with low strength, the action is invisible.

I'm confused, because I think SuperRes is better than the 1st version, but settings are gone.

On the very 1st build,I used superRes with high quality instead of mid, and with everything @ 0.0 except strength.
Since, I never succeed to reach the same "quality" i had at the beginning.
I suppose with "at the beginning" you mean the algorithm which had all the options like anti-aliasing, anti-ringing etc? That version of the algorithm was technically inferior to the latest algorithm. I understand you liked it, but Shiandow has trashed it for the new algorithm. Maybe the new algo can still be improved a bit, but I agree with Shiandow that it's better than the old one.

Oh, do I seriously have to justify myself on this?
No, you don't have to. All I was trying to say is that judging image quality can be a difficult task. And I was trying to prove it by showing that you yourself are changing your opinion once in a while. Anyway...

So HQ looks better or worse depending on the footage and it's now forced, bleh...you even said yourself that you were not sure whether it decreased or improved PQ when you first implemented it.
Yes, but since then I've done some tests and found that I always clearly preferred HQ on. And it's technically, scientifically better, too. And the majority of users seemed to agree, too.

HQ off produces a different look, one that I personally find very artificial looking.

Well, SR only takes care of upscales AFAIK and pretty much all 720p movies are reencodes in one way or another. I'd even dare saying that 99% of them are 1080p downscales. I do see the very same "hard" edges on whatever content when using NNEDI3 or sxbr though, it's fantastic for tiny videos but they both seriously try too hard for 720p@1080p to my eyes. NEDI is sharper than J3AR and yet doesn't give that nasty computerized look, please don't toss it :o
I've not planned to toss NEDI yet. I know that there are some users who like it.

quick hard sample for super-xbr chroma ar and bilateral chroma:

start at 150 sharpness, toggle between super-xbr fast ar and slow ar.

madvr.avs

BlankClip()
Subtitle("ONE, TWO, THREE, OUR CHROMA", x=-1, y=150, size=36, spc=4, font="Microsoft Sans Serif", text_color=$aa0000, halo_color=$262626)
converttoyv12.sharpen(0.4)


you can see that fast chroma ar is superior on this image, perhaps it could be a quality/performance option for super-xbr luma/image.
Interesting method for testing!

The slow AR algo in this image believes that allowing ringing is the way to go. Which seems to not be a good decision in this case. But in many other cases the fast AR looks worse than the slow AR. You have the choice now.

For luma/image doubling I believe the slow AR is a clear winner. Tested on several images and slow AR always looked better.

I just tested the new version with NEDI as the image doubler, passes 10, strength 0.30, and use alternative color space checked.
Please try 3 passes with strength 1.00. Does 10 passes with strength 0.30 look better to you? If so, please show some comparison screenshots.

algo 0 show some blocky effects on image and the quality is quite low. The higher the number, more ringing can be observed around the hard-coded subtitles in the image. I would choose algo 1 if there should be only one left.

It seems that algo 1 (algo 0 not counted) is the most ringing resistant one in case more passes are applied. I am happy with the result of 10 passes and 0.30 (maybe someone like less) with algo 1.
Does any of this change with the new test build? The ringing should be less now, so maybe you can use algos with a higher number now?

Madshi: you recommended I try bilinear chroma upscaler to try and resolve my issues with using a 3d lut on an old laptop. I mentioned I watch 1080p content on a 1080p screen. Is there a performance impact from chroma upscaling when watching 1080p at 1080p, ie if there is no upscaling?
I usually don't ask users to test things that make no sense.

What is the best way to read performance using the ctrl+j overlay. Render time? Or is it to use cpuz to monitor gpu and cpu load?
Render times are a good indicator, but don't take them as gospel. E.g. if the GPU clocks up/down, render times are useless.

0.00 sharpness is less forgiving, I kinda liked slightly increasing it in order to hide compression artifacts but yeah OK unforgiving is good too and I'm currently sitting 80cm away from a 3500:1 32"....I guess 0.00 would be just fine from a 3 meters distance.
You mean softness, not sharpness, right?

If there are compression artifacts, that should be handled by a different filter. Which sadly doesn't exist yet.

I still far prefer HQ off in .15, enabling it utterly veils the picture to me. Major bottleneck at work, this is a definite no-go
Try adding some AdaptiveSharpen, that makes the image look more like HQ off.

I've never seen the appeal of using an upscaler and then slapping on a 'corrective' AR algorithm. Ideally, a scaler shouldn't introduce ringing in the first place. Maybe it's so popular because the red and green bars suggest that it's the best. Remember that these bars aren't an objective assessment. I'd be curious to see each scaler's wave diagram instead. If you want to try something new, there's plenty of other upscalers. I'm a big fan of Spline 3 for upscaling and Mitchell for downscaling. SoftCubic 70-80 is great for dealing with bad encodes and old SD content.
Ideally an upscaler would work magic. In real life we have to make do with what science has given us so far. If you want an algo which doesn't ring by itself, try Bilinear, Nearest Neighbor or Gaussian. Ouch. Pretty much everything else rings. Even NNEDI3 adds a bit of ringing in some situations. As Hyllian already mentioned, some ringing is sometimes beneficial, which makes the whole thing difficult. E.g. try some frequency burst test patterns without ringing. You'll get very bad results.

Madshi do you plan on introducing a frame interpolation function in Madvr ?
No. At least not any time soon. There are devs which work on that, see SVP. I doubt I could do a better job than them, at least not with the limited amount of time I have.

Suggestion: Could we have a checkbox for image enhancement to just enable it if no luma upscaling is applied?
This would be useful to prevent sharpening of sharpening artifacts when also using it as an upscaling refinement.
I think it would be neat to help NNEDI3 with AdaptiveSharpen, but I don't want it combined AdaptiveSharpen of image enhancements, which on the other hand is neat to fight chroma blur a bit.
My thinking was that image enhancements should only be activated on demand if you happen to play a source which is overly soft. As such, it would still make sense to run image enhancements and upscaling refinement at the same time.

But all of this is still up for discussion. We're not there yet, though. I want to first reduce all the sharpening options as much as possible. Only afterwards we'll go back to see when to use image enhancements vs upscaling refinement, in combination or not etc...

Some more NNEDI3 vs super-xbr doubling test. Sorry about the image size, I don't know how to crop always exactly the same pixels.
However, I could do this in future if someone explained this to me. :)
720p -> WQHD, Jinc3AR chroma

super-xbr 100 is sharper than NNEDI3 64, but ringing gets more obvious and lines aren't as clean.
Yes, NNEDI3 is still king. Totally agree there. But it's also still very slow.

I just tried a bit around with AdaptiveSharpen vs. FineSharp as upscaling refinements, and I have to say that I now understand why some people describe FineSharp as pure destruction.
It increases ringing in a very unpleasant way, but you need need a lot of strength to make it actually sharpen things noticeably.
With AdaptiveSharpen, you can use much smaller values and it will really sharpen areas which actually need the sharpen. It also doesn't suffer by ringing like FS in LL.
FineSharp by design sharpens the heck out of image details, which means it also sharpens the heck out of noise and image artifacts. I guess FineSharp should only be used on very clean high quality sources.

I'm really liking super-xbr at 50 for chroma and image doubling with bilinear upscaling/downscaling. Upscaling DVDs with Jinc AR looks pretty terrible, but Bilinear hides the source artifacts quite well. Sharpness is nice, but not if it makes the videos look worse.
Bilinear? Euwhhh! If you want to hide source artifacts, I'd suggest SoftCubic instead.

At least I wouldn't choose algo 2 because of the softness and between 1 and 3, I don't see a real difference with 720p content I've quickly thrown at it. But since 1 tends to make some colors to bright with cartoons, maybe there's no good reason not to use 3?
Softness? Algo 2 should make lines thinner compared to algo 0 or 1. On a quick check this may look softer. But it also looks more natural, IMHO. Might be a matter of taste, though. If you like fat lines, probably AdaptiveSharpen is also your friend.

When image doubling, does chroma upscaling happen before chroma doubling?

In that case, would the chain look like...

chroma > super-xbr (chroma upscaling) > super-xbr (chroma doubling)
madVR always upsamples chroma to the same resolution as luma first (4:2:0 -> 4:4:4).

What kind of ringing or aliasing would an anisotropic filter produce? Assuming it could be used for upscaling chroma...
I think anisotropic filtering is for 3D stuff, like surfaces that are perspectively distorted. I don't think it's useful for video processing.

Hey, quick question. I am planning on building a rig based around a UHD screen and a 980Ti (not just for movies). Of course, since there is little UHD content in the wild I intend on primarily watching upscaled 1080p movies. Up until now I didn't care about upscaling too much with my current config, but of course in this project upscaling quality will be paramount, since my viewing angle will be optimized for UHD (i.e. the picture will be much bigger), not 1080p. Is NNEDI3 1080p -> 2160p feasible with a high-firepower GPU such as the 980Ti or is it too extreme still? Is NNEDI3 good enough to provide high quality presentation of 1080p upscaled to 4 times the typical effective picture size?
A lot depends on the frame rate, of course. 60p processing consumes 2.5x as much performance as 24p. Doing NNEDI3 1080p -> 2160p should be easy for a 980Ti with 24p. Not sure about 60p.

But yes, NNEDI3 is a good choice if you want max quality and it's the best you can use for that job. I'd add one pass of SuperRes or FineSharp on top of that, to improve perceived sharpness even more. You may also want to use debanding because many Blu-Rays still have banding in them.

If you want to save GPU power, super-xbr would be a *MUCH* faster alternative. Quality is a bit lower than NNEDI3, but still quite good.

What can I say? It's amazing. Even 10 passes don't ruin the image to my personal taste. It's definitely not what I'd use, though.
Any obvious changes compared to the previous build?

I just tried between 2 passes, strength 1.0 vs. 4 passes, strength 0.50 with madVR latest test build, result as follow:

For a moment I almost doubt that I am looking at the same picture. I would say, that madshi has changed the SuperRes's behavior quite a lot from the original.

The original idea is that the images should converge as passes increasing.

Do you have any comment on that madshi?
So you agree that 2 passes 1.0 looks very similar to 4 passes 0.5? So the settings I suggested do make sense, right?

Neat, new SuperRes has an AA effect, even though the image gets sharper (e.g. with that "high" preset).

But very interesting: The effect of SuperRes is totally different between super-xbr and NNEDI3: It seems to be much stronger with the latter one. Is this by design?
I don't know. So you'd be fine with my suggested SuperRes settings?

[Anime Viewer]

I just tried between 2 passes, strength 1.0 vs. 4 passes, strength 0.50 with madVR latest test build, result as follow:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/heo0bzw64tbph2y/madVR-test6-2pass-strength1.00.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x94w0few0dfkedg/madVR-test6-4pass-strength0.50.png?dl=0

For a moment I almost doubt that I am looking at the same picture.
The pictures you posted look almost identical to me. Aside from the creases in his forehead and the creases in the sleeve of the passerby I'm not seeing anything noticeably different between the two. Of the two I think the first one (strength 1 with two passes) looks better than the second one (strength 0.50 with four passes).

In my tests 10 passes with strength 0.10 looks almost identical to 1 pass with strength 1.00. So 2 passes with strength 0.40 should look almost identical to 1 pass with strength 0.80. If you disagree, please show me a screenshot where 2 passes with 0.40 look clearly better than 1 pass with 0.80.

This is extremely important, because different strength values don't cost performance. But 2 passes is exactly twice as slow as 1 pass.
Given both the performance difference and the small difference I see between the two pictures Anima posted I vote for the higher strength with less passes. In my testing I see very little ( on my sources) in the low, medium, high, and ultra settings you noted before. I could see myself using the low or medium settings, but don't think I'd every use the high or ultra settings given how much of a performance hit they are with not enough significant image improvement. (Pretty much the same reason why I choose to use Super-xBR instead of NNEDI3).

Edit: I like the way it combines with image enhancements (not the upscaling refinement version) of Adaptive Sharpening (not sure on the strength...0.3 or 0.5 maybe), but I'll hold back on further commenting on that until you want to talk about combining effects.

[Eyldebrandt]

I'll reply to all your posts later. For now I would just like to share a new test build, using a tweaked SuperRes algorithm:

http://madshi.net/madVR8816b.rar

SuperRes image quality should generally be slightly better than in the official v0.88.16 build, furthermore I've added an anti-ringing filter which should noticeably reduce ringing artifacts introduced by SuperRes. I hope that the anti-ringing filter will allow us to use algo 2, which is my favorite algorithm, but didn't work well due to the added ringing artifacts in v0.88.16. FWIW, if I had to decide on final SuperRes configuration right now, it would be this:

- algo = 2
- use alternative color space = off
- low: strength=0.5; passes=1
- medium: strength=1.0; passes=1
- high: strength=1.0; passes=2
- ultra: strength=1.0; passes=4

Would like to have your feedback about this. If you believe that the above settings are a totally bad idea, please let me know. Ideally with a small sample which shows that other settings work much better. Or if you like my settings, please let me know, too. Thanks!



Well, SuperRes is, again, quite better than the previous build.
But it creates a huge amount of aliasing.

Here is a sample.
that's the Gone Girl Blu-ray (which is what we can call a very high quality content) upscaled to 3440x1440 résolution in 2.39 ratio.
Chroma is NNEDI3 64, image Doubling is NNEDI3 64, downscaling is CR AR LL.

Look at the police car, the framing of the rear door.

No SuperRes, No Adaptative Sharpen
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3684/18994178993_9800b97c81_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3684/18994178993_58c4b55d97_o.png)

SuperRes high, No Adaptative Sharpen
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3696/19588916236_a4a16029c7_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3696/19588916236_c1f8f07c18_o.png)

SuperRes ultra, No Adaptative Sharpen
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3725/19608070552_e72099ed44_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3725/19608070552_f01d9bd101_o.png)

SuperRes ultra, Adaptative Sharpen 0.3
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3687/18994134813_7690bfc1da_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3725/19608070552_f01d9bd101_o.png)

No SuperRes , Adaptative Sharpen 1.5 (ridiculous setting, just for science, though)
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3790/19427175360_6298c8e44b_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3790/19427175360_12b13af06d_o.png)

[Ver Greeneyes]

Ideally an upscaler would work magic.Like this (http://psychic-vr-lab.com/deepdream/pics/13162.html)? :D (top is processed, bottom is original) Of course there are some problem areas, and there are way more examples where this neural network generates extremely weird things (https://twitter.com/DeepdreamBot), but I thought its performance on this particular image was pretty incredible.

[Anime Viewer]

Here is a sample.
that's the Gone Girl Blu-ray (which is what we can call a very high quality content) upscaled to 3440x1440 résolution in 2.39 ratio.
Chroma is NNEDI3 64, image Doubling is NNEDI3 64, downscaling is CR AR LL.

Look at the police car.

No SuperRes, No Adaptative Sharpen
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3684/18994178993_9800b97c81_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3684/18994178993_58c4b55d97_o.png)

SuperRes high, No Adaptative Sharpen
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3696/19588916236_a4a16029c7_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3696/19588916236_c1f8f07c18_o.png)

No SuperRes , Adaptative Sharpen 1.5 (ridiculous setting, just for science, though)
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3790/19427175360_6298c8e44b_b.jpg (https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3790/19427175360_12b13af06d_o.png)

What part of the police car do you want us looking at? Given its a high quality sample (blu-ray) I wouldn't expect us to see much of a difference, and the "no SuperRes/no A Sharp" looks just as good to me as the SuperRes'd images. The Adaptative Sharpen 1.5 (no SuperRes) image looks pretty good to me. On the 1.5 image I can read the 59 on the license plate pretty well, but on all the other images the 59 is blurred.
Perhaps a settings that uses certain features (like SuperRes) on low resolution content, and others active on higher resolution content (like AS) would be a good idea. I know we can do this with rules pretty easy right now, but in the interest of simplifying things it might be something to look into down the road.

[Eyldebrandt]

The rear window of the car.
The sample with AS @ 1.5 is ugly as hell. Wax on trees, loss details on fines structures, luma pixels oversharpened. But, less aliasing than ultra SuperRes.

The best combo is not on those samples, uit's NNEDI3 + low set for AS.

It's obvious to say a feature can be good for one content and not for an other.
But, the point is, if SuperRes might be destructive on these type of content, what is he doing on poor quality content ?
To my opinion, i have more to gives to Mathias with this kind of sample, rarer than 480p to 1080p content. I can post hundred of samples, but, hey, obviously, 480p to WQHD or 4K will look shit w/e you've used. So i'll focus on those who can show important details.
i.e, i have a sample who shows the destructive action of SuperRes to pixels when bitrate is high and amount of details is huge. Step by step.

[Anime Viewer]

Like this (http://psychic-vr-lab.com/deepdream/pics/13162.html)? :D Of course there are some problem areas, and there are way more examples where this neural network generates extremely weird things (https://twitter.com/DeepdreamBot), but I thought its performance on this particular image was pretty incredible.

Which is the original image (top?), and which is the effected image (bottom?). What is it supposed to be doing to the picture? To me it looks like the top picture has textures, and may be real life pictures collaged together. The bottom looks like the image was transformed into an animated version. They are quite different images when compared (the dog in the middle with the black dots around its mouth in the bottom image is quite different from the same dog nose and mouth area in the top image, as are the fur and eyes on many of the dogs). They both look like very nice images, but are also very different looking.
Given its Google their source probably wouldn't be to accessible for integration into software like madVR and MPDN (from a rights perspective).

[XMonarchY]

Are all 3 madVR sharpening methods considered to be superior to TV's built-in sharpening post-processing? Is there a way to test that somehow?

[Ver Greeneyes]

Which is the original image (top?), and which is the effected image (bottom?).The bottom image is the original (counterintuitive I know). Check out some of the other images linked from that twitter bot.

Given its Google their source probably wouldn't be to accessible for integration into software like madVR and MPDN (from a rights perspective).Yes, I don't think the Apache license is compatible. But the bigger issue is that it's just a remarkably good looking example* :D It really does a number on images that aren't composed of animal heads - it's not suitable at all as a general algorithm unless you want to make your videos look extremely psychedelic.

* although it does add an extra head onto the body of the big dog in the bottom left

[Anime Viewer]

The rear window of the car.
The sample with AS @ 1.5 is ugly as hell. Wax on trees, loss details on fines structures, luma pixels oversharpened. But, less aliasing than ultra SuperRes.

The best combo is not on those samples, uit's NNEDI3 + low set for AS.


I was looking at the image in the forum re-sized size. :o
When I look at them opened in separate browser tabs at the full image resolution I still like the AS only image best. To me the back car window (including the bricks you see through it), the camera, the roof tiles, the bricks, the stone walkway, the light on top of the cop car, the writing on everything (the car, the house number, the fore mentioned license plate). The only thing that I think may look less real is the bush by the far right house window. Where the leaves on the plant look like they could be more from a painting than actual plant. (I still think the branching/trunk of the bush looks better in the AS only image compared to the others).
Our difference in opinion on what looks good/best is subjective and why its nice to have choices as to what effects we'd each want to have enabled or disabled given particular content.


* although it does add an extra head onto the body of the big dog in the bottom left
haha, I missed the ghost dog in my initial looks at those images.


The bottom image is the original (counterintuitive I know). Check out some of the other images linked from that twitter bot.

Yes, I don't think the Apache license is compatible. But the bigger issue is that it's just a remarkably good looking example* :D It really does a number on images that aren't composed of animal heads - it's not suitable at all as a general algorithm unless you want to make your videos look extremely psychedelic.


Looking at the dog images, and learning what the real vs modified image was made me think it could be interesting for use on anime/drawn characters to show what a real life counterpart to the characters might look like. Then I saw the other images, and how it seems to like to put disturbing looking eyes on all the other pictures I'm seeing on http://psychic-vr-lab.com/deepdream/ (If that is the area you wanted me to see the other pictures?) Like you said its probably not all that useful in madVR where we want to keep images relatively close to the look of the original source material.

[tFWo]

Rings of Saturn are gone. Rings of Uranus remain. :D (madshi don't hate me, mods please don't ban me :thanks:)

AR filter helps a lot. Alternative color space (acs) is just bad. I prefer algo 1.

But tonight I found out that s-xbr100+ and SuperRes don't like each other. Something is seriously wrong when you use s-xbr with sharpness 100 or higher and SR.

720p source

sxbr100-nosr

http://i.imgur.com/3ujev1b.png

sxbr100-sr-pass1-str1-algo1-noacs (This is what I called dirt in the last post. :) SR actually blurs/darkens the numbers on the plate.)

http://i.imgur.com/yYiNCzc.png

sxbr100-sr-p1-s1-a1-acson

http://i.imgur.com/TaQ2uOw.png

nn64-sr-p1-s1-a1-noacs (no blurring with NNEDI3)

http://i.imgur.com/YYCEMrK.png

nn64-sr-p1-s1-a1-acson

http://i.imgur.com/TIbk0BD.png

nn64-sr-p1-s1-a2-acson aka Rings of... :P (imagine how this looked without the AR filter)

http://i.imgur.com/Y2a0xuR.png

[aufkrawall]

My thinking was that image enhancements should only be activated on demand if you happen to play a source which is overly soft. As such, it would still make sense to run image enhancements and upscaling refinement at the same time.

But all of this is still up for discussion. We're not there yet, though. I want to first reduce all the sharpening options as much as possible. Only afterwards we'll go back to see when to use image enhancements vs upscaling refinement, in combination or not etc...

Ok, I will come back on it.


Yes, NNEDI3 is still king. Totally agree there. But it's also still very slow.

With Hawaii GPU, image doubling with 64 neurons can be done for 1080p30 via DirectCompute:
http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=10701740&postcount=18
:)


I don't know. So you'd be fine with my suggested SuperRes settings?
Yes, I think the values are useful with the current alogorithm.
But I think Shiandow should take a look at the issue Eyldebrandt reported. Maybe there is a connection to why SuperRes seems to become much more aggressive with NNEDI3 compared to super-xbr?

[MS-DOS]

Any obvious changes compared to the previous build?

Much less ringing and probably other artifacts. The difference is bigger when more passes are used.

[leeperry]

Yes, but since then I've done some tests and found that I always clearly preferred HQ on. And it's technically, scientifically better, too. And the majority of users seemed to agree, too.

HQ off produces a different look, one that I personally find very artificial looking.

I've had time to read the few pages I missed while I was away and it would appear that the "majority of users" you would be mentioning is actually two guys in this thread, maybe three.

Either way, I fully agree that you are the captain onboard and that what matters most is your own satisfaction eventually. I'm also glad and extremely thankful for the fact that you were kind enough to share this gem of a VR.

I rest my case that I'm quite sure nobody uses the "don't use linear light for dithering" debug option anymore and I would happily trade it for "don't use HQ downscaling for SuperRes" if any possible please.

You mean softness, not sharpness, right?

If there are compression artifacts, that should be handled by a different filter. Which sadly doesn't exist yet.
I did, my bad. The softness knobs does come in handy sometimes, especially as sxbr50 is a ringing feast so decreasing sharpness and setting softness to 0.01 or 0.02 hits the spot very nicely IME. The latter can also indeed be increased to hide compression artifacts very effectively :)

Try adding some AdaptiveSharpen, that makes the image look more like HQ off.

I really like SR's effect on motion-blur, I'm not interested in running another sharpening filter on top but thanks for the advice.

All this said, I'm currently equally impressed by my audio and video rigs and it seems that .15 is the last version of mVR that allows SR softness, disabling HQ and allowing to change the SR sharpness and number of passes(0.65/3 for me). I'm totally cool with sticking with it, I wish sxbr also came with a knob so I could try my luck with 35-40(25 being too soft and 50 too strong) but anyway I'm not interested in mVR with SR having HQ forced and 3 presets only so I might very soon find myself with a lot more free time on my hands...and with no regret at that coz PQ is stellar :scared:

I'll remain on the lookout for a version of mVR that will support dimensions changing PS scripts then :)

[Anime Viewer]

I rest my case that I'm quite sure nobody uses the "don't use linear light for dithering" debug option anymore and I would happily trade it for "don't use HQ downscaling for SuperRes" if any possible please.



Are you referring to having "don't use linear light for dithering" checked or unchecked? I keep it checked as I see a huge performance hit if I leave it unchecked, so if you're advocating having it unchecked and the option removed then I'm against that. If on the other hand you're advocating having it checked by default with the option to uncheck it removed then I'd be fine with that configuration.

[leeperry]

Are you referring to having "don't use linear light for dithering" checked or unchecked?
I didn't realize it had any effect on performance, I think you would be surprised how much banding this option adds to any gray ramp.......to the point that enabling debanding in mVR and checking this option would be utterly counterproductive IMHO. It might very well also affect your judgment on other post-processing settings.

Fair enough, well there's still some room for an extra option otherwise ^^

[Warner306]

When image doubling, does chroma upscaling happen before chroma doubling?

In that case, would the chain look like...

chroma > super-xbr (chroma upscaling) > super-xbr (chroma doubling)

If you are trying to understand the process from a beginner's perspective and use MPC, the following guide is a good beginner's guide:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=209596&pid=1843555#pid1843555

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=209596&pid=1849097#pid1849097

[ryrynz]

When I look at them opened in separate browser tabs at the full image resolution I still like the AS only image best.


The 1.5 extreme setting? There's no other image that has AS only enabled. I hope you don't mean that one because it looks absolutely terrible, the contrast it adds to the image alone is enough to gag over.


Here is a sample.
that's the Gone Girl Blu-ray (which is what we can call a very high quality content) upscaled to 3440x1440 résolution in 2.39 ratio.
Chroma is NNEDI3 64, image Doubling is NNEDI3 64, downscaling is CR AR LL.


The SR high no AS image is extremely subtle with lots of very minute changes. There is no significant change here (back up by the image analysis I did) so I think this particular setting for this content is pretty much pointless.

The SR ultra no AS image offers something more substantial but still subtle, more edges are done stronger. I generally like what I see.

The SR ultra 0.3 AS image is actually binary identical to the above no AS image, so you must've goofed it because at the very least there should be dithering differences.

[QBhd]

Well, SuperRes is, again, quite better than the previous build.
But it creates a huge amount of aliasing.

Here is a sample.
that's the Gone Girl Blu-ray (which is what we can call a very high quality content) upscaled to 3440x1440 résolution in 2.39 ratio.
Chroma is NNEDI3 64, image Doubling is NNEDI3 64, downscaling is CR AR LL.

Look at the police car, the framing of the rear door.



Not sure what the rest of you are looking at (including the one who posted this) but the last image is stunning. I have been reading a lot of the posts lately, and it seems everyone wants a soft image. Soft=blurry.... I would love a crisp and clear image (with no artifacts, ringing or aliasing of course) And I must say this last image is just that.

QB

[ryrynz]

And I must say this last image is just that.


I'm not going to get into a sharpening preference discussion, but there's only so far you can go sharpening an image before image quality degrades and I think No SR + AS 1.5 kinda passed it.
Not saying there aren't some obvious "improvements" but there's also a lot not to like with that setting, I'm sure I could find something that suited my tastes better whilst attaining similar sharpness (if I wanted that)

[Schwartz]

Ideally an upscaler would work magic. In real life we have to make do with what science has given us so far. If you want an algo which doesn't ring by itself, try Bilinear, Nearest Neighbor or Gaussian. Ouch. Pretty much everything else rings. Even NNEDI3 adds a bit of ringing in some situations. As Hyllian already mentioned, some ringing is sometimes beneficial, which makes the whole thing difficult. E.g. try some frequency burst test patterns without ringing. You'll get very bad results.

True. I've been digging into the subject a bit since yesterday and benchmarked some scalers. I ended up just running Mitchell. I do a lot of picture downsizing with Mitchell and it turns out that it's pretty damn good for video upsizing as well. Probably nothing for the 'sharper' crowd but I find it's a nice compromise.

I've never really seen NNEDI3 ring, but then again I don't see sxbr 50-75 ring all that much either. But all of my image doubling happens to SD content where it can 'do some work', a bit of smoothing is usually desired. Pixel-perfect encodes I leave alone.

I second the user who said he'd enjoy more sxbr options. 60-65 might be the sweet spot for me. Maybe an input field?

[SithUK]

I've given up on using a 3D LUT for now. I've tried turning the LAV filter decoding to None (instead of DXVA native), and using the Bilinear chrome upscaler. I tried ticking all boxes in the "trade quality for performance" section. Unfortunately my average render speed sometimes exceeds 50ms on busy action scenes, with 40ms being the minimum for a 25fps film.

It looks like a 5 year old laptop (i5 2.4Ghz/4Gb/HD 4500) is too old tech to manage a 3D LUT.

Fortunately I've sourced a new lamp for my JVC X3 and the colours look ok, so I can live with the setup for now. Thanks for the help in trying to get a 3D LUT to work for me.

I've had a look and the Ati 540v that I have is basically a mobility hd 4550. Userbenchmark.com has it as comparable to an Intel hd2000.

Should I try selecting all the tick boxes in the trade performance for quality section? The default install has the first half of the options selected already.

The default chroma, up scaling, and down scaling options are already as suggested above. (Bicubic and lanczos)

I tried adjusting the 3d lut bit rate option on the trade performance for quality page to the lowest value of 6. I still had stuttering playback.

Is there anyway to divert the load from the gpu to the cpu?my processor is showing max 6%, and that is likely for only one of the 4 cores.

Is my hope of using a 3d lut with this laptop realistic? (Cpu is i5 m450 @ 2.4Ghz, 4Gb ram, Ati 540v gfx)

[madshi]

Given both the performance difference and the small difference I see between the two pictures Anima posted I vote for the higher strength with less passes. In my testing I see very little ( on my sources) in the low, medium, high, and ultra settings you noted before. I could see myself using the low or medium settings, but don't think I'd every use the high or ultra settings given how much of a performance hit they are with not enough significant image improvement. (Pretty much the same reason why I choose to use Super-xBR instead of NNEDI3).

Edit: I like the way it combines with image enhancements (not the upscaling refinement version) of Adaptive Sharpening (not sure on the strength...0.3 or 0.5 maybe), but I'll hold back on further commenting on that until you want to talk about combining effects.
Ok, thanks.

Well, SuperRes is, again, quite better than the previous build.
But it creates a huge amount of aliasing.

Here is a sample.
that's the Gone Girl Blu-ray (which is what we can call a very high quality content) upscaled to 3440x1440 résolution in 2.39 ratio.
Chroma is NNEDI3 64, image Doubling is NNEDI3 64, downscaling is CR AR LL.

Look at the police car, the framing of the rear door.
Could I have a small sample, please? Maybe a PNG of the original Blu-Ray frame might already be good enough, if enlarging the PNG produces the same aliasing artifacts (I think it will).

Like this (http://psychic-vr-lab.com/deepdream/pics/13162.html)? :D (top is processed, bottom is original) Of course there are some problem areas, and there are way more examples where this neural network generates extremely weird things (https://twitter.com/DeepdreamBot), but I thought its performance on this particular image was pretty incredible.
Euwh, weird!!

The rear window of the car.
The sample with AS @ 1.5 is ugly as hell. Wax on trees, loss details on fines structures, luma pixels oversharpened.
Which is the opposite of what SuperRes does. Which is why I like SuperRes. Although it currently still has its problems. But maybe we can solve them.

To my opinion, i have more to gives to Mathias with this kind of sample, rarer than 480p to 1080p content. I can post hundred of samples
If you can find more samples where you see problems with SuperRes, by all means, hit me! The more samples we have, the better we can work on tuning to SuperRes to get rid of the artifacts.

Rings of Saturn are gone. Rings of Uranus remain. :D (madshi don't hate me, mods please don't ban me :thanks:)

AR filter helps a lot. Alternative color space (acs) is just bad. I prefer algo 1.

But tonight I found out that s-xbr100+ and SuperRes don't like each other. Something is seriously wrong when you use s-xbr with sharpness 100 or higher and SR.

[...] (This is what I called dirt in the last post. :) SR actually blurs/darkens the numbers on the plate.)
SuperRes tries to make sure that the upscaled image is a "correct" interpretation of the sources. Obviously in this case SuperRes believes that the numbers on the plate are too bright. And if you compare the super-xbr numbers to the NNEDI3 numbers prior to SuperRes, they *are* brighter in the super-xbr image. That's why SuperRes tries to tone them down again. Maybe it doesn't do a very good job at that, but generally that's the concept of SuperRes.

With Hawaii GPU, image doubling with 64 neurons can be done for 1080p30 via DirectCompute
And probably with OpenCL, too. Unless you're stuck with PCIe 1.x or something. Btw, it's not DirectCompute, but PS5.0, I think.

Much less ringing and probably other artifacts. The difference is bigger when more passes are used.
Cool, thanks.

I've had time to read the few pages I missed while I was away and it would appear that the "majority of users" you would be mentioning is actually two guys in this thread, maybe three.
I think it was four, plus my own strong preference, against only one clear and reliable vote (yours) for HQ off. Yeah, not a lot of votes, but I have to work with what I'm given. Of course I could just tweak the algos myself, based on my own preferences. But just to be safe, I'm asking for feedback. And if the majority vote of the feedback happens to agree with my own eyes, then I think things are pretty clear.

I rest my case that I'm quite sure nobody uses the "don't use linear light for dithering" debug option anymore and I would happily trade it for "don't use HQ downscaling for SuperRes" if any possible please.
The "trade quality for performance" options are there to trade quality for performance. What you're asking for has nothing to do with performance. So the option you want would not belong into the "trade quality for performance" section.

True. I've been digging into the subject a bit since yesterday and benchmarked some scalers. I ended up just running Mitchell. I do a lot of picture downsizing with Mitchell and it turns out that it's pretty damn good for video upsizing as well. Probably nothing for the 'sharper' crowd but I find it's a nice compromise.

I've never really seen NNEDI3 ring, but then again I don't see sxbr 50-75 ring all that much either. But all of my image doubling happens to SD content where it can 'do some work', a bit of smoothing is usually desired. Pixel-perfect encodes I leave alone.

I second the user who said he'd enjoy more sxbr options. 60-65 might be the sweet spot for me. Maybe an input field?
An input field doesn't fit into the current settings dialog, at least not without a redesign. Maybe I'll add finer options between 50 and 100, but I'm really tired of changing the settings dialog all over again all the time, so I'll probably not do that soon.

I've given up on using a 3D LUT for now. I've tried turning the LAV filter decoding to None (instead of DXVA native), and using the Bilinear chrome upscaler. I tried ticking all boxes in the "trade quality for performance" section. Unfortunately my average render speed sometimes exceeds 50ms on busy action scenes, with 40ms being the minimum for a 25fps film.

It looks like a 5 year old laptop (i5 2.4Ghz/4Gb/HD 4500) is too old tech to manage a 3D LUT.
That's too bad.

[aufkrawall]

And probably with OpenCL, too. Unless you're stuck with PCIe 1.x or something. Btw, it's not DirectCompute, but PS5.0, I think.

Thanks for that clarification. Can results of DirectCompute even be shared with D3D9?
Problem is the extreme divergent results of copyback performance, some users have far less than half performance of PCIe 3.0 with 2.0, what shouldn't be.
I couldn't use NNEDI3 at all when I had a R9 290X due to this. Since I really like a lot NNEDI3, I'm somewhat tied to Nvidia when I want to use it in madVR. :(

[Anime Viewer]

I didn't realize it had any effect on performance, I think you would be surprised how much banding this option adds to any gray ramp.......to the point that enabling debanding in mVR and checking this option would be utterly counterproductive IMHO. It might very well also affect your judgment on other post-processing settings.

I'm not sure why, but the rendering hit I used to encounter with it unchecked is no longer occurring (perhaps a bug was fixed, or I had a different setting enabled at the time). I'm not noticing any improvement in banding with it unchecked, but maybe the source files I'm testing never had much banding to begin with...


Not sure what the rest of you are looking at (including the one who posted this) but the last image is stunning. I have been reading a lot of the posts lately, and it seems everyone wants a soft image. Soft=blurry.... I would love a crisp and clear image (with no artifacts, ringing or aliasing of course) And I must say this last image is just that.
QB

Those are my impressions as well. The last image that was clearer and crisper than the others looked better to me too. Some of the people may be having issue with the strength setting that was apparently used with the last image, and they may view it as overkill since its being labeled at strength 1.5. If the same image was posted with a strength listing of .5 or 1 it might not get as much complaint. Perhaps the same image with a setting of .5, 1, or something in-between would give similar clarity. Regardless I see Adaptive Sharpening as beneficial.

[Ver Greeneyes]

Euwh, weird!!Haha, I know. It's kind of fascinating what specialized neural networks can do when given free reign though. I'm sure we'll get to human levels of recognition one day (and it'll stop adding weird eyes all over the place). For a bit more context, there was a google research blog post about their neutral networks here (http://googleresearch.blogspot.nl/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html) (and this follow-up (http://googleresearch.blogspot.nl/2015/07/deepdream-code-example-for-visualizing.html) for the code.

[madshi]

Thanks for that clarification. Can results of DirectCompute even be shared with D3D9?
Yes.

Those are my impressions as well. The last image that was clearer and crisper than the others looked better to me too. Some of the people may be having issue with the strength setting that was apparently used with the last image, and they may view it as overkill since its being labeled at strength 1.5. If the same image was posted with a strength listing of .5 or 1 it might not get as much complaint. Perhaps the same image with a setting of .5, 1, or something in-between would give similar clarity. Regardless I see Adaptive Sharpening as beneficial.
The house, roof and many edges look better in that image, but everything nature (grass, bushes) in front of the house looks absolutely terrible. Looks like a water color / oil painting instead of a photo.

Haha, I know. It's kind of fascinating what specialized neural networks can do when given free reign though. I'm sure we'll get to human levels of recognition one day (and it'll stop adding weird eyes all over the place).
Maybe, but NNEDI3 will be ultra fast compared to such kind of algorithms.

[leeperry]

The "trade quality for performance" options are there to trade quality for performance. What you're asking for has nothing to do with performance. So the option you want would not belong into the "trade quality for performance" section.
I would also be cool with creating a folder in mVR's folder such as "SuperRes HQ OFF" or something if that's not too much trouble please. You allowed this kind of kludge in the past to force PC levels and a few other things, not the end of the world apparently as it's not adding clutter to the GUI and won't raise questions from newbies either? :o

I think it was four, plus my own strong preference, against only one clear and reliable vote (yours) for HQ off. Yeah, not a lot of votes, but I have to work with what I'm given. Of course I could just tweak the algos myself, based on my own preferences. But just to be safe, I'm asking for feedback. And if the majority vote of the feedback happens to agree with my own eyes, then I think things are pretty clear.
Duly noted, still the middle of summer in the US and EU is more than likely not the best time to take decisions of such paramount importance(to me at least :D) when it comes to an option that adds such a nasty veil to the picture IMHO. Talk about one step forward, two steps backwards :(

That's usually how they do it in my country when they wanna pass laws nobody would agree on, they pass them at night during summer, case closed :devil:

Either way, HQ is a complete showstopper for me so if .15 is seriously the last version providing a switch for it then I'm more than likely through with updates till mVR supports resolution-changing PS scripts so I could go nuts and mess with ALL the SR/sxbr settings......any very rough ETA for this please? Apart from "not soon"?

Or maybe I'll get bored of SR at some point as I do realize that it's extremely sharp and I've never been a fan of sharpening to begin with, but its effect on 24p motion blur with HQ off is pure magic to me in combination with monostatic ED2@8bit :cool:

I'm not sure why, but the rendering hit I used to encounter with it unchecked is no longer occurring
If you were using it in combination with any kind of ED, run a gray ramp and you'll both be be horrified and happy to have it unchecked now ;)

[iSunrise]

Thanks. Maybe I can add an AR filter to FineSharp in the future.
Extremely interesting idea. Would love to try it out.

But now to my follow-up regarding Finesharp vs. AdaptiveSharpen, which I now had a bit more time to dig deeper, after I did some more tests with different samples.

On a more general note, from the samples I looked at, Finesharp is a lot more uniform with it's sharpening, which especially benefits real-world content, since it doesn't selectively sharpen like AdaptiveSharpen. Which means that, if you want to sharpen the whole image for basically the same value, Finesharp is definitely the way to go. It also looks way more natural due to this behaviour.

AdaptiveSharpen is definitely not a replacement for Finesharp, but more like an additional sharpening effect, which can be beneficial on some content, but (see below) you have to be very careful with higher values.

Also, there are huge (and I mean HUGE) differences when you compare both algorithms using image enhancements and upsaling refinement, more below.

Here's an example, why I would completely stay away from AdaptiveSharpen on the image enhancements tab, no matter what values you set.

Image enhancements - Finesharp 1.0

http://abload.de/thumb/snes_chroma_bilaterals9oov.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=snes_chroma_bilaterals9oov.png)

Image enhancements - AdaptiveSharpen 0.3

http://abload.de/thumb/snes_chroma_bilateral7grf3.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=snes_chroma_bilateral7grf3.png)

I think I don't need to explain the results, they speak for themselves. Finesharp can be used with very high values (I still would recommend not to go much higher than 1.0), while AdaptiveSharpen even beginning from values like 0.1 already rings and 0.3 already rings like crazy and it also adds some very strange look to the image. On game recordings, anime and real-world content, this should be avoided at all cost. For image enhancements, Finesharp is the clear winner on all the content I have looked at and tested. With an additional AR algorithm applied, Finesharp would be very close to perfect.

The situation with the higher ringing that AdaptiveSharpen shows when used in the image enhancement tab, completely reverses when you use AdaptiveSharpen on the upscaling refinement tab. Using the same values from above, AdaptiveSharpen rings a lot less than FineSharp in this tab, however, it still retains that oil painting look that worsens the higher you go with the values.

So, for me, personally, I would stay away from AdaptiveSharpen in the image enhancements tab altogether and only use it in the upscaling refinements tab and also preferably with VERY low values (like 0.1 or maybe even lower).