I finally installed this one after only doing some tests on some of the beta versions couple months ago and I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. Coming from 2.6.4 I feel more comfortable going back to 2.6.4 than staying on 3.0.11 so hopefully I can give some pointers on what I feel is wrong.
Starting out with the UI, I feel like in general it feels worse though it does have some improved features. In terms of responsivity it feels more responsive than it was in the beta version I tried but yet still feels worse than 2.6.4. The 2.6.4 UI is easier and quicker navigate through, though I’ll say that I think the individual menus of enabling the certain features you want instead of just a list of models is a good improvement. I also think that the ability to change the amount of time you want to preview is a nice addition but at the same time the previewing now feels like a hindrance compared to 2.6.4.
Previewing is quite laggy on playback, scrubbing the timeline is laggy and the time it takes to load and process after clicking preview takes too long making iterating between settings slow. While it does show the time it takes to process a frame or fps (which ever you chose in the settings) that number is just replaced by the export time once it’s finished processing the preview, it would be nice to have that number shown even once processed like it did 2.6.4. In 2.6.4 I quite liked the ability to 4 way preview and compare multiple models in different views that you can zoom and scrutinize without clicking between them, I don’t know if that’s possible in the new UI but it isn’t obvious to me how to do that or if it exists at all. I also think that now that the previews are processed as files (maybe it was way before) it seems that possibly it’s slower because it’s actually taking the time to export each preview than just maybe saving it to ram or something. I don’t know how the previous preview was implemented I just know that it was faster.
Processing times are also disappointing. I can understand that moving from 8bpc to 16bpc operations can slow down the processing time but was under the assumption the general improvements of 3.0 along with TensorRT models might make a significant improvement to the performance but yet I’m left with performance that is either the same or even worse than 2.6.4. I don’t know if I’m even using the TensorRT models but I’m just using whatever model it auto downloads when I click on the model I select. I’m currently using a 4090 with a 5950x with 64gb of ram and previously had a 3090. The performance difference between the 3090 and 4090 is not worth comparing since it largely performs the same with marginal differences that could be attributed to multiple variables but I assume that it isn’t even properly utilizing either cards considering that I’ve seen much worse cards perform exactly the same.
Model quality remains the same but I know what I’m getting when I use VEAI and personally I’ve never really had many issues with the quality of the models aside from the issues I made clear in my post about the color handling in the beta. Though obviously better models would be nice and probably expected on a major version update. I know some have mentioned about Nvidia’s “RTX Video Super Resolution” though personally if its anything like their MAXINE effects then it isn’t really close to the fidelity that VEAI produces. Perhaps the Artifact Reduction might be useful but their SuperResloution or Upscaler that I tried wasn’t that impressive. *(Edit, after looking at the RTX Video Super Resolution more it looks too good to be true, If you compare the differences between the original and upscaled frame there’s details from the original game that aren’t even present in the original image. Perhaps it’s sampling temporally throughout the video and that the original might look better in some parts but Nvidia just cherrypicked the most compressed frame out of the video.)
I think the general sentiment I have is that after using one version of VEAI for a year and moving onto the new version I don’t feel like much has changed and even feel like it’s gotten worse in some aspects like performance or that there are feature’s that I’ve lost which of course is going to feel bad. I understand that a rewrite was needed but personally I’d rather use 2.6.4 until 3.x is in a state where it objectively feels better to upgrade because right now I don’t see much reason to pay for the upgrade when it feels like I’m losing more than I gain.
