And you have to see if they’re talking about Pascal NVENC or Turing NVENC. It could be true with Pascal, but Turing NVENC is far better than x264 medium/slow or even Quicksync.
Trust me when I say this viktor, nothing compares to x265 hevc 10 bit slow preset and x264 very slow preset when it comes to quality and filesize, period. Not even the next-gen nvidia gpu with an upgraded nvenc can mimic that.
SW decoding by design will always remain superior to HW no matter what. The only real advantage HW encoding has is the blazing fast encoding speeds, at the expense of quality loss and a higher filesize.
But at the end, quality remains a subjective thing, and I will be up to you to a/b test hevc and nvenc encodes and see which you like the most.
If you’re satisfied with what nvenc has the offer then by all means enjoy it my friend and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Regardless of what others might say, to me nvenc’s only true worth is in live streaming.
4K streaming for example is too heavy a workload for encoding on typical CPU setups, but turing’s (and newer) encoder makes 4K streaming possible. But that’s about it really…
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Sorry man. All are different now. Nothing can beat Turing NVENC now. Even at slow or slower preset. At 60mbps and above, 4K no longer provides more details that human eyes can see. I encode hundreds of movies every month and I can easily tell that h.264 is now the past. Period.
But there’s a logical fallacy in there that you’re still failing to see.
Sure at 4k it can be hard to tell the difference between x265 hevc and x265 nvenc (again, the two are not same thing), but once you downscale that same nvenc encode, the flaws and quality degradation are further amplified.
You think it’s a downscaler problem, but it’s actually an encoder one.
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Is there a way to use there Gaia CG model from 1.6.1 in any new versions of the app?
I haven’t used Gaia CG in awhile, as it got downgraded in 1.7.0 and 1.7.1. After that it got dropped from the Known Issues in the Release Notes, so I thought they fixed it, but after using Gaia CG in 2.1.1, it is pretty clear that 1.6.1 is still much, much better with the animation I am trying to work with.
Again. I said I didn’t downscale. It’s a waste of time. I use my movies for youtube uploading and store in the hard drive. I’m not going to store a 1TB 25m movie. Not sure if you understand. If you’re going to have 16K TV, then it’s correct. But at the moment, you’re wasting your time and resources
Wait for next update. Or the following one… You can message the devs.
I’m trying to follow your tips but I’m a bit confused on some aspects. I’m working with 480p footage that I’m looking to upscale to 1080p or 4k.
What are the recommended steps? As I understand them:
- Take original footage import into DaVinci Resolve and upscale to 720p
- Use Gaia HQ with 200% to upscale to 1080p.
- For export format as TIFF output
- Combine TIFF images together using handbreak or ffmpeg or Adobe Media Encoder as x264 ?
Perhaps consider an indepdent webpage with your results as well as some sample footage that you have upscaled?
It depends on your input footage. For 480p to 1080p or 4K, use Gaia CG first to 1080p then use Gaia HQ to 4K. Or Gaia CG to 720p and Gaia HQ to 1080p. TIF image sequence. Use Adobe Media Encoder to combine.
Thank you very much Viktorz for your guide, its greatly appreciated.
I do have a Low-Bitrate DVD, containing music videos from the 80s (Michael Jackson`s VISION DVD from 2010) . Its interlaced, a direct transfer of the original video tape masters, source was telecine transfer from the time. The source is quite blocky. Deinterlacing with QTGMC (Placebo+BOB) does wonder, no trouble retrieving a 59.94fps + 480p signal.
There is one thing in those videos that are my clear guideline: shots of a crowd during a concert. Using Artemis MQ or LQ on those shots, even with grains, looks positively awfu on those shots. The only thing cleaning the blocking effectively was your Theia fidelity settings, but it washed out too much details and a dithering pattern is all over the picture, even at 100% Size with grain. So, I had to go more conservative.
I tried this:
- Deinterlace DVD with QTGMC at maximum settings. No cropping, no resize at all. Export in Lossless x264 as 720x480 mp4.
- Importing footage into VEAI, I tried using Gaia CG (with 2.0/2.5 grain) to 1280*720.
- Upscaling to 1080p with Gaia HQ afterwards (no grain).
Details are kept nicely indeed, but the blocking was all but removed, and sometime even enhanced. Im not too sure what could be done about this, maybe I read your guide wrong.
What would you recommend? Thanks
So these are the steps I believe that will help your situation.
- First, use Gaia CG to 720p. Grain 2.0/2.5.
- Use Deinterlaced DV after that (why? because in this model, a sharpen filter will be applied which is not a good model to start with). No grain 0/0.
- Use Artemis AA after that so the blocks will be cleaned. Grain 2.0/2.5.
Let me know the result then. If you don’t like grain with Artemis AA, try not to use it and see if you like it. I personally like grain sometimes.
Thank you for your quick reply. I’ll try it real soon.
- Deinterlaced Dv will double the framerate, isnt it?
- After all those steps, Gaia HQ to 1080p as I did?
Yes. That’s right.
This is the solution I found:
- Hybrid: Deinterlace with QTGMC (Preset: Placebo / Bob) + Crop + McTemporalDenoise (Preset: High)
- Hybrid: Srestore to remove blended frames (Omode=4, Mode=-1, Cache= 10, Speed=-1, Thresh=12) but keep framerate. Ideal for mix of video/film transfer
- VEAI: Upscale to 720p with Gaia CG (Grain 2.0/SIze 2.5)
- VEAI: Upscale to 1080p with Gaia HQ (No Grain)
- Ffmpeg: Encode to VFR with filter Mpdecimate (remove duplicates)
And it works! This is a very acceptable compromise.
I’m glad you found the way. Good job.
Just updated new performance sheet with RTX 3090. A little bit comparison between RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3090 at early stage. Over 20% performance increased.
One must also note, with Ampere one can or should have the same speed in fp32 as in fp16.
With the 2080ti you have twice the speed with fp16 than with fp32.
That means the RTX 3090 can deliver better quality at higher speeds if you can see a difference.
can someone compare this?
It will take a little bit more time. I will retest with other models as well and report back to you.
EXPERIMENTAL!
There were a lot of new features introduced in both AMD and NVIDIA’s drivers this year. However, the same old Windows 98 based tech still exist in Windows 10 noticeably hindering graphics performance, so here are how to disable them.
-Disable AGP Texture Acceleration
I recommend disabling AGP Acceleration (granted you’re not using an AGP card) by adding the following DWORD value in your registry:
Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw”
Create a new DWORD called DisableAGPSupport and make it’s value 1.
-Disable MMX
Another one is MMX. It wan’t that good back then and it’s not even used nowadays. Disable it as well (since it uses AGP acceleration) by creating a new key in: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft” named: Direct3D.
Inside your newly created key/folder, create two DWORD’s called DisableMMX and DisableDP2 and make both their values 1.
Making these changes will give you an overall nice boost in GPU performance (especially RTX GPU’s) that I hope will also translate into VEAI/Topaz products in general as well.
4/24/2021: Today, I upgraded 5800X to 5950X and 5% performance gained just from that. So based on the testing, upgrade from 5800X + RTX 2080 Ti => 5950X + RTX 3090 gave me 25% performance boost in total. Cost me a lot but it’s worth it for 30% time + electricity saving. Huge deal. Also I changed my PC case to another one, replace AIO with Noctua NH-D15 air cooler and 7 noctua fans. My GPU and CPU temp dropped to 67°C both, and VEAI gained another 5% from that. In total 10%. So 30% after upgraded with more airflow helped a lot for long term using. I use VEAI 24/7, so that’s awesome. With OC, I can achieve 5% more from RTX 3090, a total 35% performance gained at 62°C. What a monster.
RTX 3090 + 5950X
*1080p => 4K
Gaia HQ + CG => from 0.50 to 0.43
Artemis HQ => from 0.40 to 0.33
RTX 3090 + 5950X (after OC)
*1080p => 4K
Gaia HQ + CG => from 0.43 to 0.4
Artemis HQ => from 0.33 to 0.31
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