Vertical "stripes", areas of "excessive crunchiness" in VAI 2X4K->8K

[dice-9293]

The first two (crop) images are from a ~1 second clip using plain (auto everything) 2X resolution enhancement (to UHD 8K from 4K) using 3.4.1. TIFF output cropped to PNG.

- 0th frame
- 27th frame
In this area (and a couple of others), the system is hallucinating vertical features that don’t exist. Notice the artifacts are not there at the 0th upscaled frame, only by the 27th frame. The original video was shot on a tripod using a Sony a6600 - 97Mb/sec, yuv420p, BT2020 (Adobe RGB selected in color space). There are other areas where it looks like MED was over-applied leading to “crunchy” or “stippled” appearence.

Screenshot from 3.3.10 showing before/after (behavior the same in 3.4.1)

Windows 11 Home 10.0.22000, mobile 3060 531.14, 40GB of DDR5
12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-12700H, 2700 Mhz, 14 Core(s), 20 Logical Processor(s)

[ida.topazlabs]

This is a known issue with the Proteus model that we have noticed is more prevalent in Auto mode when upscaling to a higher factor. Can you please switch to Manual mode and adjust the parameters to reduce this linear effect?

[dice-9293]

Man absolute RC:0, ID:10, Sh:5, RN:40, Deh:20, AA/D:10, AN:0, ROD:20 works reasonably well in this setting. Better than default-auto, but not as good as Gaia. Perhaps that should be the default for simple upscaling?