Should I download Version 4.0, or stay with 3.17?

If you're curious how SVP 4 TP fare, you can always try it without uninstalling SVP 3.1.7

I've installed SVP 4 TP twice, and uninstalled it too twice.

The pricing and other information are available at the bottom of story page, or at the TP download page itself.

It's still Technical Preview and the provided interface still basic so I can't edit the setting like I do with SVP 3.1.7.

Since I mainly use SVP 3.1.7 and the SVP 4 will be unused so I just uninstalled it.

The finished product will be lot better, you should try it when the devs finally release it

It really depends on your individual needs. I personally make use only of the features that already exist in the Technical Preview of SVP 4, and have already seen better results with the smoothed video when compared to 3.1.7, as well as better GPU acceleration overall. So for me using SVP 4 TP is a nobrainer, and I've already upgraded to it on multiple computers with no major issues.

So if you make use of the features in SVP 3.1.7 that haven't been implemented in the Technical Preview then wait. However if you aren't a poweruser and only requires the motion interpolation bit then you really don't waste anything on not trying SVP 4 TP out. SVP 4 requires 3.1.7 to be installed and working anyway, so it's entirely possible to have the two of them installed at the same time and just launching the SVP Manager of your choice.

You can even change the running SVP Manager mid-playback to either revert to v3.1.7 or try out v4 TP on the fly.

Feature list comparison:

Keep 4.0 installed, and just switch between both versions.

4.0 gives me better results/performance on my hardware, but I still switch to 3.1.7 to tweak certain genres (animation, for example).

(Continued from above)

Then these images approximately show the different 'style' of interpolated (simple frame doubling) frames produced by the two SVPs:

                                                        SVP 3.1.7

                                                          SVP 4

Basically, SVP 4 produces 'jumpy' images (like watching a 24fps video on a 48hz el-cheapo lcd with very slow pixel response times of >20ms), while SVP 3.1.7 can be configured to produce more 'wavy' artifacts, but actually moves the objects in the frame to produce a new frame with the objects in-between their respective locations in the previous and next frames (which I find to be the whole point of motion interpolation, but some {most?} people seem to prefer the SVP 4 way).

This does, however, only affect difficult motion areas. In places without much temporal aliasing to begin with, both SVPs perform very well and generate a proper interpolated image.

Yes, in general you are correct.

What I was trying to explain, was a easy metric that people (who do not know about the relationship between architecture, IPC, transistor dimensional scaling, core count and clock frequency) could use to quickly determine if their PC has the potential to run SVP 3.1.7 at a higher quality than SVP 4.
With all "relatively recent" (i.e. released with or after the Sandy-Bridge generation) CPUs being gimp'ed by consumer opposition against powerful processors, all of the 'high TDP' processors are performing relatively similar (compared to the generational improvements before), especially in SVP (a 5-10% difference would not reliably make a higher quality level attainable).
With that in mind, neither clock speed, nor model number, nor core or cache count, nor any other single parameter that is listed on the physical packaging or on the official online Intel "Tech specs" listing correlates as well with the CPU's potential SVP performance as TDP does.

True, but if someone were to try to use the IGP while running SVP on the CPU (perhaps even using the IGP for SVP), then there might not be enough TDP budget left for a heavy SVP 3.1.7 configuration.

Also, I never said that if CPU A's TDP > CPU B's TDP >= 80W; THEN CPU A's performance = CPU B's performance * f(CPU A's TDP / CPU B's TDP), where f is a linear or sub-linear function.
I understand that AMD doesn't have access to Intel's advanced process nodes, so their TDPs will be significantly higher simply due to the manufacturing node being optimised for low-TDP parts (<50W) and their CPUs being designed to run at high clock speeds, meant that they had to use a significantly higher voltage than the process was originally intended for (and power scales with the square of voltage). Also, TDP figures are not comparable between manufacturers. So, yes, TDP is not a perfect performance measure by a long shot, but what other single 'spec sheet' number is? Maybe price, lol.

Anyway, I simply thought that someone who doesn't know whether to choose SVP 3.1.7 or SVP 4 could quickly look up the TDP of their processor, since it is the single most important parameter influencing modern consumer purchases (allegedly). If their PC is less than about 4.5 years old and they have a CPU TDP > 80W, then they should be able to use higher quality settings in SVP 3.1.7. And that was all that I meant by it.

Thank you for pointing me to that thread; I never would have believed that a Core 2 Duo can run SVP at all, let alone as well as you described.
Very interesting indeed.

Ps. It seems that Chainik has indicated that, once SVP4 is fully released, you will indeed be able to fully configure all of its settings, just like you can with the current SVP 3.1.7.
So then the question becomes moot, SVP 4 will become better than 3.1.7 in all aspects; a.k.a. progress without regression!

Cool. I believe the computational complexity increases quadratically, i.e. O(N^2), while the quality degradation is extremely subjective (such as very small blocks actually degrading the image quality), but probably only degrades linearly with increasing size.
Now you have given me ideas; I am busy disabling most of my cores through the bios and underclocking to 1.8GHz to see what the best image is that I can produce under those circumstances.