@lemans99,
I’m siding with @david.123 on this one.
Technologies progress. Incompatibilities with older technologies happen.
If it’s a matter of getting a refund for you not looking up the system requirement before purchasing—take it up with support. Topaz cannot meet their improvement goals and implement this conflicting demand of ‘reverting back to not requiring AVX2’.
Reading most of the feedback on here, TVAI 3.5.4 is what currently working best for the majority of users. It has no such requirement. Nyx 2 doesn’t work as far as I’m concerned. So you’re not missing out on that.
They created their forum account using a different email address than the one they purchased the product with (if this is the case and they prove it I’ll apologize to them and remove my post about the AVX2 requests being spam).
The more likely case is that they have not paid for a licence and are using a cracked version of the software.
You have all the badges. If you want them to show up when someone mouse hovers over your name, you have to mark them as ‘favorites’ on your profile (click on the stars).
If Topaz can demonstrate that they in fact have delivered faster rendering because they abandoned AVX2, that is fair. If they can’t deliver the added value to users than its not fair. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
A somewhat correlated but ultimately separate issue that rubs many people the wrong way is the related to the concept of trust.
I would however urge Topaz marketing team to handle it better. There was not much heads up for users before they made that change. Some people purchased license and if development of v3 is not included, they miss out on the bug fixes and optimization which is still present in v3. And that is not good look for the company to treat its users that way. Especially since we have seen other companies often handicap software for force upgrade. Too many examples to count, but one that I’m sure many are familiar with is Windows 11 from Microsoft.
“The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0 and Secure Boot are also required to provide a better security environment and prevent sophisticated threats against hardware and firmware, common malware, ransomware, and other attacks.” But with a simple software tweak this was not needed anymore and people could install Win11. Under the excuse of “for your safety” we have seen companies and governments screwing over many users. I am not saying that is what Topaz has done, but its easy to see how avoiding to give appropriate heads up period to users and not really delivering on the premise of faster performance could lead people to be suspicious of the Topaz motivation.
Topaz had dropped support for existing products that worked well ,and try to sell users inferior products. Mask AI, JPEG to RAW AI , DeNoiseAI , Shapren AI, GigaPixel AI were all promising products and some worked and still work pretty good. And yet with no real warning Topaz bizarrely descried to replace it with PhotoAI which still, after many versions can’t do everything as good as it used to work. So when Topaz without warning drops support for AVX2 which some users rely on, that move is bout to raise some eyebrows. And rightfully so. Wouldn’t you agree?
P.S.
I have to agree with this. I had high hopes for denoising only algorithms, especially because unlike other solutions for denosiing on the market, Topaz had best anti compression artifacts models. So I had high hopes. But as it is now, its too slow and results are not as good as something you can get with existing tools for much faster render times. I hope Topaz optimizes the rendering times and polish the results, especially for reducing noise in human skin and keeping the details. They still look a bit too plastic.
Indeed lemans is slow compared to formula 1 please buy a new Server Laptop It is time for lemans to buy a High END AMD with a Nvidea 4090 watercooled [lease stop moaning about AVX2 10 years legacy extension thanks David
Assuming you meant it the other way around: Adding AVX2 requirement rather than removing support for it. I agree, it should have been a major point in the marketing—though their marketing is pretty out of this world so it might not have had any affect.
My only counter point to consider is: software development is not always that straight forward. Often times at my job, when we change out an old technology for a new one, there is no difference (besides new bugs) at first. But having made the change, over the next year or so, we can start to leverage the possibilities it opened up. Then things really do get better. There’s just that whole year time frame where no one really sees the benefit.
