madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[Stereodude]

Originally Posted by madshi

What does the HQV Benchmark DVD have to do with anything? People put way too much stock into those test results. It contains just a bunch of test scenes. Real world material is often more difficult than those test scenes. Furthermore most of those test scenes are for video content. Only 2 of all those tests are targetted at film content.

NVidia does not have deinterlacing and IVTC "nailed" at all. It works reasonably well, but there's room for improvement. Of course the biggest problem is the lack of decimation, but we can't fault NVidia for that, it's a limitation of the DXVA deinterlacing API. But there are other problems, as well, e.g. reliable detection of PAL film vs video. Which btw the HQV Benchmark doesn't really stress test at all.

He said it didn't work and suggested they were using a Bob. I was simply pointing to some objective 3rd party measurements / test to show that it does work (in at least those test cases). That seemed better than saying, "It seems to work pretty well for me."

Where I live I'm pretty much never going to encounter PAL film content. It's either going to be film with a telecine to make it i60 which needs an IVTC, or true interlaced video content. IMHO, what would be nice would be user side options allowing some of the cadence patterns to be blocked in the IVTC routine, and some way to configure madVR so that it will attempt an IVTC and if the IVTC fails it will pass the footage to the video card driver for "video" deinterlacing. Currently it seems I have to disable automatic source type detection and force film for the IVTC routines in madVR to work, and if I play back true interlaced video content it's not going to be properly handled until I enable automatic source type detection again.

[flashmozzg]

Originally Posted by madshi

D3D11 does not support Vista and XP, both of which madVR still supports. Also DXVA is usually still based on D3D9 (although win7 now also supports hardware accelerated decoding with D3D11, I think).

It supports Vista (or in other words Vista supports it). Only xp is left out. But xp will soon become not supported even by microsoft.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Stereodude

IMHO, what would be nice would be user side options allowing some of the cadence patterns to be blocked in the IVTC routine, and some way to configure madVR so that it will attempt an IVTC and if the IVTC fails it will pass the footage to the video card driver for "video" deinterlacing. Currently it seems I have to disable automatic source type detection and force film for the IVTC routines in madVR to work, and if I play back true interlaced video content it's not going to be properly handled until I enable automatic source type detection again.

The current madVR deinterlacing solution is just a first step. More steps to come at some point in the future. But probably not soon.

Originally Posted by flashmozzg

It supports Vista. Only xp is left out.

You're right. It's the 3D features of D3D11.1 which are not supported on Vista.

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by madshi

You're right. It's the 3D features of D3D11.1 which are not supported on Vista.

Those are not even in 7, aren't they?

[madshi]

Oh yes, I think you're right! Seems my mind is playing tricks on me today. Need some sleep...

[DragonQ]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Those are not even in 7, aren't they?

.....

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Platform Update for Windows 7 includes a limited set of features from Direct3D 11.1, though components that depend on WDDM 1.2 - such as feature level 11_1 and its related APIs, or quad buffering for stereoscopic rendering - are not present.

[turbojet]

The 2:2, 3:2 file is indeed soft telecine, 96.55% film according to dgindex.

Originally Posted by Stereodude

Where I live I'm pretty much never going to encounter PAL film content. It's either going to be film with a telecine to make it i60 which needs an IVTC, or true interlaced video content. IMHO, what would be nice would be user side options allowing some of the cadence patterns to be blocked in the IVTC routine, and some way to configure madVR so that it will attempt an IVTC and if the IVTC fails it will pass the footage to the video card driver for "video" deinterlacing. Currently it seems I have to disable automatic source type detection and force film for the IVTC routines in madVR to work, and if I play back true interlaced video content it's not going to be properly handled until I enable automatic source type detection again.

If madvr looked for a 3:2 pattern and if not found switched to deinterlacing it would work for almost everything out there. While I haven't done much watching with the 'fixed lav video' setup, doing this would solve almost all the problems I currently have. It keeps trying to find a cadence and can't. cadence.mpg is fixed with lav video. cadence_extreme.mpg and combing.mpg should be fixed if searching only for 3:2 or deinterlace. The interlaced overlay 'bottom_combing.mpg' and motion_bottom.mpg problems would still exist but maybe something can be found in IT.dll source (which handles both great).

EDIT: Would the repeat_first_flag or something else have an effect on hard telecined material? Switching to it reduce cadence breaks from about 1 per minute on average to 1 every 2.5-3 minutes.

[huhn]

Do you know a freeware game with which is able to run in fullscreen exclusive mode on a secondary display? That would be good for testing. In any case, please feel free to report this problem to the madVR bug tracker. I don't know when I'll find the time to look into this problem, though.

starcraft 2 is free to play (at least a part of it) and it has an option to set the default monitor, perfect for this test. but it's big...

https://us.battle.net/account/sc2/starter-edition/

[6233638]

Originally Posted by madshi

D3D11 does not support Vista and XP, both of which madVR still supports. Also DXVA is usually still based on D3D9 (although win7 now also supports hardware accelerated decoding with D3D11, I think).

I know that you want to support as many operating systems as possible, but Vista does have support for D3D11, and even Microsoft is dropping support for XP in April.

I'm not saying that you should rip out the existing D3D9 functionality, but if supporting D3D11 would improve madVR in a meaningful way (e.g. 10-bit output) it's something to consider.

[Ver Greeneyes]

Originally Posted by 6233638

I know that you want to support as many operating systems as possible, but Vista does have support for D3D11, and even Microsoft is dropping support for XP in April.

I'd say a bigger problem with Direct3D 11 is graphics card support - for instance, only the GeForce GT 430 and up support D3D11. The first GeForce 4xx cards became available in April 2010 (whereas Vista dates back to January 30, 2007). Mind you that's mostly a reason to not rip out Direct3D 9 support.

[flashmozzg]

Originally Posted by Ver Greeneyes

I'd say a bigger problem with Direct3D 11 is graphics card support - for instance, only the GeForce GT 430 and up support D3D11. The first GeForce 4xx cards became available in April 2010 (whereas Vista dates back to January 30, 2007). Mind you that's mostly a reason to not rip out Direct3D 9 support.

Dx11 is backwards compatible with Dx10, though some dx11-specific features are not supported on Dx10 cards (like HW tessellation)

[Stereodude]

Should FSE have higher rendering time than Windowed mode? I just got a Radeon HD7790 using the 13.12 drivers under Windows 7 (32-bit) with MPC-HC 1.71 that's what I'm seeing. In FSE I can barely keep the rendering time under 1/60th of a second if I crank up the madVR settings with all the driver video "enhancements" disabled. In Windowed mode I can use the max madVR settings and enable all of the video enhancements (except edge-enhancement) and still have a few ms of rendering time to spare.

[cyberbeing]

@Stereodude

If you've set the number of video frames presented in advance too high, maybe. AMD cards behave better with low values like 6 to avoid DPC latency issues.

If you are using a refresh rate higher than your video, FSE is slightly more intensive since it presents a frame every vsync interval, while Windowed mode only presents a single time for each video frame.

If you've set Flush or Flush & Wait for any of the render steps, that will also increase render times and/or tendency for dropped frames quite a bit under heavy GPU load.

Otherwise, ensure you are not forcing Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, VSync, etc globally under your GPU's 3D settings. Any globally forced settings will be detrimental to madVR performance under FSE. GPU video "enhancement" settings should also be left disabled if you are using madVR.

[Stereodude]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

If you've set the number of video frames presented in advance too high, maybe. AMD cards behave better with low values like 6 to avoid DPC latency issues.

If you are using a refresh rate higher than your video, FSE is slightly more intensive since it presents a frame every vsync interval, while Windowed mode only presents a single time for each video frame.

If you've set Flush or Flush & Wait for any of the render steps, that will also increase render times and/or tendency for dropped frames quite a bit under heavy GPU load.

Otherwise, ensure you are not forcing Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, VSync, etc globally under your GPU's 3D settings. Any globally forced settings will be detrimental to madVR performance under FSE.

I pretty much haven't changed any of the default settings in madVR. I will take a look at some of your suggestions later. I did find that disabling Aero in full screen exclusive mode dropped the FSE rendering time several ms.

GPU video "enhancement" settings should also be left disabled if you are using madVR.

Aren't these "enhancements" done ahead of the madVR render? If so, some of these features and madVR aren't mutually exclusive. Sure some of the features should be avoided like the plague like edge-enhancement and dynamic contrast, but the noise reduction features when used in moderation can be beneficial.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by turbojet

Would the repeat_first_flag or something else have an effect on hard telecined material? Switching to it reduce cadence breaks from about 1 per minute on average to 1 every 2.5-3 minutes.

The repeat_first_flag field only has an affect on soft-telecined content. If you see reduced cadence breaks with LAV decoder compared to the other decoders than that probably means that the content you're testing with is not purely hardware-telecined, but that it is probably a mixture of soft- and hard-telecine. Which is the case for many broadcasts and DVDs...

Originally Posted by huhn

starcraft 2 is free to play (at least a part of it) and it has an option to set the default monitor, perfect for this test. but it's big...

https://us.battle.net/account/sc2/starter-edition/

Hmmmm... Does it actually switch the default monitor in the Windows settings? Meaning: Does the taskbar switch over to the other monitor while playing? Or does it only play the game on the other monitor while leaving the start menu on the original monitor?

Originally Posted by Stereodude

Should FSE have higher rendering time than Windowed mode? I just got a Radeon HD7790 using the 13.12 drivers under Windows 7 (32-bit) with MPC-HC 1.71 that's what I'm seeing. In FSE I can barely keep the rendering time under 1/60th of a second if I crank up the madVR settings with all the driver video "enhancements" disabled. In Windowed mode I can use the max madVR settings and enable all of the video enhancements (except edge-enhancement) and still have a few ms of rendering time to spare.

FWIW, you shouldn't put too much weight into the rendering times. They might be accurate, or they might not. E.g. they're not accurate if you don't have a "flush & wait" of some kind set for the last rendering step. It's more important to check for dropped frames. In my experience windows mode drops frames earlier than FSE mode, if rendering times get near to the "max". That applies especially to "smooth motion FRC". With e.g. 24fps @60Hz playback with smooth motion FRC enabled, I've found that the rendering times in windowed mode must be smaller than 1/60s, while in exclusive mode they only need to be smaller than 1/24s, to achieve smooth playback. Anyway, as long as no frames are dropped with any specific settings, you're fine.

Most of the video driver "enhancement" algorithms only affect the image (and the rendering times) if you use either DXVA deinterlacing or DXVA scaling. Otherwise they should have no effect.

[Vyral]

@Stereodude
I've got a AMD HD 6800 series (13.9 drivers). The following settings works perfectly on madVR (less than 10 delayed frames on 2 hours video and no dropped frames) :
Render queue (CPU & GPU) : 12
Number of video frames presented in advance : 6
I disabled all "enhancements" together with IVTC processing in CCC and set the output to RGB 4:4:4 full range.
Moreover, HW acceleration increase the redering time, see if it's enabled in MPC-HC > LAV video settings

[huhn]

Originally Posted by madshi

Hmmmm... Does it actually switch the default monitor in the Windows settings? Meaning: Does the taskbar switch over to the other monitor while playing? Or does it only play the game on the other monitor while leaving the start menu on the original monitor?

i was trying to find this out and realize it is not possible i mixed the game up or something else i'm sorry. i'm still confused about this...

[Stereodude]

Originally Posted by madshi

FWIW, you shouldn't put too much weight into the rendering times. They might be accurate, or they might not. E.g. they're not accurate if you don't have a "flush & wait" of some kind set for the last rendering step. It's more important to check for dropped frames. In my experience windows mode drops frames earlier than FSE mode, if rendering times get near to the "max". That applies especially to "smooth motion FRC". With e.g. 24fps @60Hz playback with smooth motion FRC enabled, I've found that the rendering times in windowed mode must be smaller than 1/60s, while in exclusive mode they only need to be smaller than 1/24s, to achieve smooth playback. Anyway, as long as no frames are dropped with any specific settings, you're fine.

Well, it was also dropping frames in FSE, but wasn't in Windowed. However, I was using DXVA native in LAV which end up reporting the clips as 59.94fps instead of 29.97 for 1080i60 files. Using DXVA copy back or software decoding the clip frame rate was reported as 29.97 and the dropped frames stopped. While still using DXVA native mode I was also able to reduce the reported rendering time and eliminate the dropped frames in FSE by disable desktop composition in full screen mode.

Most of the video driver "enhancement" algorithms only affect the image (and the rendering times) if you use either DXVA deinterlacing or DXVA scaling. Otherwise they should have no effect.

That's good information to have. I don't mind using some of the noise reduction features with light settings. However, I didn't realize they weren't active if madVR was doing IVTC and the sophisticated scaling algorithms. Frankly, I'd rather have smooth motion than some light noise reduction.

Originally Posted by Vyral

@Stereodude
I've got a AMD HD 6800 series (13.9 drivers). The following settings works perfectly on madVR (less than 10 delayed frames on 2 hours video and no dropped frames) :
Render queue (CPU & GPU) : 12
Number of video frames presented in advance : 6
I disabled all "enhancements" together with IVTC processing in CCC and set the output to RGB 4:4:4 full range.
Moreover, HW acceleration increase the rendering time, see if it's enabled in MPC-HC > LAV video settings

I've been testing with the defaults of 16 & 8 respective for the queues. Frames in advance for FSE is 4 (default). I didn't notice HW acceleration in LAV increasing the rendering time / dropped frame count (aside from the DXVA native vs. DXVA copy back thing already mentioned), but I will do more testing today. I have been able to find settings that give me no dropped frames with all the features I wanted enabled and that was the important thing.

[madshi]

FWIW, the next madVR version will have a default number of pre-presented frames of 8 (instead of the current default value of 4).

[huhn]

found the real game with that option. it's world of tanks. it doesn't change the taskbar it's free to play and if i get it right it's direct x 9.