madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[har3inger]

There are quite a few comparison images madshi released back when he was posting teasers for the new algorithm. They are for luma channel more than chroma, but it should give you an idea of what it's doing and its image characteristics.

To say that it's not as sharp as nnedi3 is pretty much flat out wrong though.

In terms of performance, I'm on a laptop with an OC'd R9 270x. NGU low runs substantially faster than SXBR 100 with SR2. Render time is 30 ms vs 40+ms. Image quality for the performance is astounding. It reminds me of when I first tried madvr and saw the difference between bilinear (ew, wtf) and lanczos image upscaling for the first time.

For chroma, NGU is also pretty good. However, I still like bilateral soft SR2 over it for cartoon content, because bilateral is really effective at removing source ringing.

[Ver Greeneyes]

Alright, I redid all my profiles for 720p and 1080p content (and 1080p and 2160p displays) to incorporate NGU, and I like it. It's indeed very sharp, and leaves little to the imagination, but especially from a distance I think that just gives everything more definition. The addition of 'low' is very helpful - medium is still too much for my GTX 1060 3G in many cases, but I think low still looks great (I did use medium and high where I could though).

I even like it for Chroma - sure it doesn't give the sharpness of Reconstruction, but the performance is good and it doesn't look nearly as artificial (when looking only at the Chroma channels). I honestly can't see the difference in the full image anyway, but NGU low is cheap enough that it fit into my profiles nicely (with one exception where I had to fall back to Super-XBR).

[Warner306]

The in-app performance meter says super-xbr is sharper than NGU. Is this true?

[Patrik G]

Originally Posted by har3inger

To say that it's not as sharp as nnedi3 is pretty much flat out wrong though.

your using a shitty laptop with an LCD panel with 300 lines of motion resolution LOL
im using a reference Kuro the 500M which is 3D LUT calibrated.
leave your comments about sharpness man until you get a decent display

[Unr3aL]

What's consensus now on which options have to be disabled in conjunction with NGU?
There have been quite a few posts mentioning different things and as there's multiple similarly named "enhancements" in different tabs I'd like that to be specified a bit more precisely...

From what I gathered, the following HAS to be disabled:
Under artifact removal:

• reduce dark halos around bright edges, too

Under image enhancements nothing seems to be needed or broadly in use anyways.

Under chroma upscaling:

• activate SuperRes (do people even use this? I use the one in upscaling refinement with NNEDI3)

Under image doubling:

• double chroma resolution (most say, there's no visible benefit with any algo)

Under upscaling refinement:

• sharpen, crispen, thin, enhance, LumaSharpen and AdaptiveSharpen not needed (I used only crispen and enhance)?
• SuperRes

And finally, Anti-Ringing is said to be included in NGU, but which of the ARs is/are the one/s to be disabled?
Reduce ringing artifacts can stay, I guess (different to anti-ringing)?
AR in image downscaling?
AR in image upscaling?
AR in upscaling refinement?
Any other AR?

Honestly, there are so many anti-ringing checkboxes, that I don't know, which are redundant, which are overkill or which are plain useless...
I mean, how much ringing can one possibly remove? Madshi I think this would be one thing to consider weeding out, if you ever come to simplifying madVR...

Soften edges and add grain "should" be used. What values do you people like?
Catmull-ROM upscaling was only a low performance recommendation i guess, madshi?
And last, but not least: Has anyone seen any benefit in quadrupling (e.g. double medium + quadruple low).

Hope that's not too much... But maybe we can get some of this answered, so madshi can maybe auto-disable some of those options on NGU use...
Feel free to add, what I forgot.

Greetz, Unr3aL

[EpsilonX]

Originally Posted by EpsilonX

@madshi
Is this behaviour normal..?

Originally Posted by madshi

I don't know your settings, so I can't say for sure. I see nothing wrong with the screenshot, though.

Chroma Upscaling : Bicubic 75 AR
Image Downscaling : Bicubic 150 AR
Image Doubling : Luma NGU Low
Image Upscaling : Catmull AR

In the OSD, there's 2 Chroma...

chroma > Bicubic 75 AR
chroma > Catmull-Rom AR

[har3inger]

Yeah, that's normal.

First, bicubic 75 AR is used to upscale base chroma to the source resolution to produce 4:4:4. Next, when madvr calls for image to be doubled, NGU is used for luma, but CR ar is used for the chroma channel to upscale the 4:4:4 source to whatever output resolution you wanted.

For me, the only confusing thing is that NGU uses image upscaling settings to determine how to double the chroma, which is a bit counter-intuitive.

[Q-the-STORM]

Originally Posted by EpsilonX

Chroma Upscaling : Bicubic 75 AR
Image Downscaling : Bicubic 150 AR
Image Doubling : Luma NGU Low
Image Upscaling : Catmull AR

In the OSD, there's 2 Chroma...

chroma > Bicubic 75 AR
chroma > Catmull-Rom AR

this is all correct...

chroma upscaling only upscales chroma to luma resolution... if there is additional scaling it's gonna use the image doubling and image upscaling options...

so what you got there is a 720p video on a 1080p screen...
luma is 1280x720 which is doubled to 2560x1440 with NGU Low and then downscaled to 1920x1080 with Bicubic 150 AR

chroma is 640x360 which is upscaled to 1280x720 with Bicubic 75 AR and then upscaled to 1920x1080 with Catmull AR

Originally Posted by Patrik G

your using a shitty laptop with an LCD panel with 300 lines of motion resolution LOL
im using a reference Kuro the 500M which is 3D LUT calibrated.
leave your comments about sharpness man until you get a decent display

nice speech and all, but not only do most users say that NGU is very sharp, some even complaining that they think it's too sharp, but madshi himself has said multiple times that NGU is sharper than NNEDI3...

Originally Posted by madshi

NGU is *significantly* sharper than NNEDI3 64/128.
[...]

A comparison to "straight NNEDI3" (without SuperRes) doesn't make too much sense because it's a completely different world of sharpness.
[...]

if you want to compare NNEDI3 to NGU, you almost have no other choice than to use combine NNEDI3+SuperRes, because otherwise the difference in sharpness is simply too big to do any useful comparisons. So IMHO the proper comparison would be "NGU without SuperRes" and "NNEDI3 with SuperRes".
[...]

[Telion]

Originally Posted by madshi

Yes. I'm seriously considering dumbing the whole upscaling/doubling logic down. I know some expert users will hate it. But looking through all the posts since v0.91.1 was released, almost every non-expert user got the settings wrong, even after I explained it multiple times.

Not only does the current logic allow for serious misconfiguration (which almost all non-expert users seem to fall for atm), but it also costs endless support and correction posts.

Maybe I'll find a way to make it all easier without losing too much functionality.

I think that the main reason of all these misunderstandings is the fact that when the chroma doubling is unchecked in the "image doubling" page, the chroma doubling is handled by an algorithm selected in the "image upscaling" page. Moreover, there is the "chroma upscaling" page which is unrelated in this case. This is totally confusing and not explained anywhere except the depths of this forum.

I suggest the following rather simple reorganization of the "image doubling" page without the need to dumb it down:

1. Turn the algorithms drop-down lists into the set of radio buttons (super-xbr and super-xbr AB should have their own entries). Set their parameters through a drop-down list. One would be enough for all of them, named and filled accordingly (sharpness for super-xbr, AB strength for super-xbr AB, neurons for NNEDI3, quality for NGU). Thus it would be consistent with the "image upscaling" page.
2. On the contrary, turn the activation condition radio buttons into the drop-down lists. An activation condition is rarely changed compared to algorithms, so radio buttons for swiftness and drop-down lists for compactness.
3. For the luma, replace the activating checkboxes with additional "never" item in these drop-down lists which would turn them off.
4. For the chroma, rename the activating checkboxes to "process chroma differently" (greyed out for super-xbr and NEDI). If unchecked, the same settings as for the luma would be applied. And I doubt that separate activation options for the chroma are even needed.
5. For the chroma, add all possible algorithms, not only doublers (it's okay if this would require to leave them as drop-down lists). This is a must thing to do. The choice for the chroma doubling should definitely be unlinked from the algorithm selected in the "image upscaling" page as it is not only unintuitive, but also limits the choice for non-doubling image upscaling itself.
6. If you want to make it even more intuitive, consider moving these "activate" drop-down lists to the "image upscaling" page (and maybe add a special "parameters" button which would switch to the "image doubling" page). And/or make the whole "image doubling" page an additional tab in the "image upscaling" page (or make it a subnode in the tree). So it would be clear that image doubling is just a special case of image upscaling and not independent from its settings, while "chroma upscaling" page is a totally different thing unrelated to them.

[plasma]

Hope I am not offtopic spamming but I found this. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.05250v1.pdf (Real-Time Video Super-Resolution with Spatio-Temporal Networks and Motion
Compensation) Very intereting and promising.

I was wondering if any upscaler in madvr is using future or past frames for more detail or if all real time scaler have to be spatial scalers only.

As for NGU I am happy, altho I was too hyped after the initial teaser expecting quality near waifu2x. It still is good for low res anime, since its output is sharp and the cartoony effect is not disturbing with little aliasing.

Only problem I see is that many low res(anime) are low quality or old encodes from dvds with blocking or other artefacts, which can exaggerate with ngu.

[EpsilonX]

Originally Posted by har3inger

Yeah, that's normal.

First, bicubic 75 AR is used to upscale base chroma to the source resolution to produce 4:4:4. Next, when madvr calls for image to be doubled, NGU is used for luma, but CR ar is used for the chroma channel to upscale the 4:4:4 source to whatever output resolution you wanted.

For me, the only confusing thing is that NGU uses image upscaling settings to determine how to double the chroma, which is a bit counter-intuitive.

Originally Posted by Q-the-STORM

this is all correct...

chroma upscaling only upscales chroma to luma resolution... if there is additional scaling it's gonna use the image doubling and image upscaling options...

so what you got there is a 720p video on a 1080p screen...
luma is 1280x720 which is doubled to 2560x1440 with NGU Low and then downscaled to 1920x1080 with Bicubic 150 AR

chroma is 640x360 which is upscaled to 1280x720 with Bicubic 75 AR and then upscaled to 1920x1080 with Catmull AR

Originally Posted by Telion

I think that the main reason of all these misunderstandings is the fact that when the chroma doubling is unchecked in the "image doubling" page, the chroma doubling is handled by an algorithm selected in the "image upscaling" page. Moreover, there is the "chroma upscaling" page which is unrelated in this case. This is totally confusing and not explained anywhere except the depths of this forum.

Hats off to all of you for that explanations...
And yes, I never thought that Catmull will be used for chroma with my setting...

[Q-the-STORM]

Telion was on to something with changing the upscaling setting pages...

though I would mostly keep it like it is, make changes mostly about separating chroma out of image doubling and upscaling...
now you got chroma upscaling, image doubling, image upscaling and image downscaling...

right now chroma 4:2:0 -> 4:4:4 is determined by "chroma upscaling"
upscaling 4:4:4 chroma to display resolution afterwards is determined by "image doubling" and "image upscaling"...
upscaling luma to display resolution is also determined by "image doubling" and "image upscaling"...

Having 3 sections might be simpler:
image downscaling:
stays exactly the same, don't think anyone needs separate settings for luma and chroma downscaling...

chroma upscaling:
determines not only 4:2:0 -> 4:4:4 scaling but also additional scaling to display resolution... so if you set lanczos4 here, it will be used for 4:2:0 -> 4:4:4 scaling AND scaling to display resolution
the settings page itself would almost look completely the same, you just have to add double, quadruple (and octuple) options and make some special checkboxes for algorithms like reconstruction, since those can obviously only be used for 4:2:0 -> 4:4:4 upscaling...

luma upscaling:
the same as image upscaling was before, but now this only affects luma.... just doubling, quadrupling (and octupling) is added...


I think this way is a bit more straight forward, you got a clear separation between luma and chroma settings...

There is lots of space underneath the bars for sharpness, ringing etc, so the doubling settings might fit there even if you don't change the layout....
if you turn the radiobuttons for the upscaling alogrithms into a dropdown list, you'd get a lot of space back if needed...
though that would mean you got 2 consecutive dropdown lists, one for the algorithm and one for the strength of said algorithm...
same goes for "only if scaling factor" options, those could be turned into dropdown lists, but you'd also have 2 consecutive ones where one affects the other...
doesn't look as clean as mixing radiobuttons or checkboxes with dropdown lists..

[Asmodian]

The problem with seperate pages for luma and chroma upscaling is that there are many cases where the scaling is being done in RGB, you would need to overwrite the settings in a separate chroma upscaling page or gray out the entire page when not using image doubling. I think it is better to keep chroma and luma doubling options on the same page for this reason.

I do like the idea of dropping the separate activation settings for chroma, they probably do make sense in some situations but I bet most people don't use different ones for luma and chroma. Using a drop down for the scaling factor would be OK too, maybe use lots of dropdowns in image doubling to really pack in the number of settings on that page.

How about a third drop down below the one for "quadruple chroma resolution" that is only active if chroma doubling is disabled with luma doubling enabled? This would make it obvious that it would only be used when scaling chroma to match the doubled luma (or the doubled+downscaled luma, depending on the resolutions and trade quality for performance options).

edit: Another option would be to not let you turn off chroma doubling if luma doubling was enabled but have really a lot of options in its dropdown, e.g. for Catmull-Rom, Lanczos, etc.

[Scyna]

So I just got this msi nvidia 1070 laptop and nnedi doesn't work for me. I just get a black screen and audio. I'm on 375.95 drivers. NGU runs fine for me.

[Georgel]

NGU still adds coil whine while no other algo does this with madVR.

[aufkrawall]

Not madshi's fault, nothing to be done about it.

[khanmein]

Originally Posted by Georgel

NGU still adds coil whine while no other algo does this with madVR.

chroma upscaling NGU-low & disable image doubling (no coil whine)

chroma upscaling NGU-low & enable double luma resolution NGU, low quality (coil whine)

chroma upscaling NGU-med/high & disable image doubling with any settings (coil whine)

chroma upscaling NGU-med/high & enable image doubling with any settings (coil whine)

regarding the coil whine is very soft pitch noise unlike those circumstances during gaming which hit above crazy fps.

[leeperry]

Originally Posted by madshi

Yes. I'm seriously considering dumbing the whole upscaling/doubling logic down. I know some expert users will hate it. But looking through all the posts since v0.91.1 was released, almost every non-expert user got the settings wrong, even after I explained it multiple times.

Not only does the current logic allow for serious misconfiguration (which almost all non-expert users seem to fall for atm), but it also costs endless support and correction posts.

Maybe I'll find a way to make it all easier without losing too much functionality.

Originally Posted by madshi

I've already thought about that. But leeperry would run amok if I did that...

I so much see it coming that soon SR+NGU won't be possible anymore but I've run more tests and I really like the combination of NGU mid for luma + NGU low for chroma + SR2 LL AR when it comes to motion smoothness in combination with 60Hz FRC, I'm looking forward watching that magic on the 144Hz BenQ EX3200R so pretty please don't break my bubble......if things have to go sour, could you please create a folder hack of some sort so I could still use NGU+SR together

I think the problem is that many ppl expect simple instructions for "best" PQ without doing their homework, but they overlook that many of those are both display and personal taste dependent, obviously an uncalibrated TN display(vast majority of computer screens) won't nearly need the same settings as a videoprojector for instance. We've all seen those "tutorials" that have it completely wrong(NNEDI3-128 for chroma yeah right), so yes maybe a setup wizard with simple/expert control panels would help. You are expecting the average newbie to have read hundreds of pages of this thread here on d9, they have not and they want the best right away as they can't sit and try even dang options combination.

[Uoppi]

I know madshi has mentioned this a million times already but just to be absolutely sure:

1. Only "reduce ringing artefacts" is recommended to be disabled with NGU but not "activate anti-ringing filter" (or "anti-bloating filter" for that matter)?
2. The above recommendation applies when using NGU for luma doubling but not when using NGU solely for chroma upscaling, correct? For example, when watching 1080p content on 1080p TV using NGU for chroma, "reduce ringing artefacts" might still be of benefit?
3. Should AR for upscaling and downscaling still be used in combination with NGU or should they be disabled too?

[HillieSan]

I choose the best scaler that is below the 10 ms. I am more sensitive to judder/jitter than to sharpness.