Topic: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

Hello,

I am a layman when it comes to the intricacies of GPUs and computer hardware architecture. I only know the basics and how much you can learn from reviews on technology review websites like cnet.com or pcmag.com or techradar.com

I have been using SVP for many years now, but almost always with a very basic computer and with only intel integrated graphics.

I am planning to purchase a new laptop or desktop in the near future (next few weeks hopefully) and want to purchase something for like maximum 2100 dollars.

I do use SVP for real time frame interpolation. But I kind of have found my own specific use for it.  I transcode music videos to watch at super slow speeds.

Thus I transcode 4k resolution (at the moment I have acceess to a laptop with a RTX 2060 Nvidia GPU and a 2.6 ghz intel i7 with 6 cores) videos with rife to 59.94 fps and then take that transcoded rife file and transcode it to 240.0 FPS with the original SVP algorithm with the settings optimized to maximize fluidity while trying to minimize artifacts (as much as possible, I am more interested in the fluidity than eliminating all artifacts).

This creates a really smooth slow motion effect even when you slow down videos to very reduced playback speeds of like 10%-20% and possibly lower.

I would encode with rife all the way to 240 fps but rife has rife-specific artifacts of it's own and the transcode times are a lot longer than the SVP algorithm. The blend of the two seems to work really well.

I am also going to be able to use a 120hz monitor and/or television fairly soon. At the moment I am at 60 hz.

I also noticed that if I use a AI video enhancement software to take out any of the noise or compression artifiacts in a video and make it very crisp and clear and then transcode it with rife or even the SVP algorithm, when the playback speed goes below about 40% or less in MPV or even MPC, the playback will start having a slightly choppy effect, where it will play smoothly for 1-4 seconds but then the video will freeze for a half second or a little more or less and then start playing again and then freeze again ect, ect, with no freezes in the audio.  This only happens in videos that have been transcoded after being previoulsy reencoded by being run through an AI video enhancement filter.  I don't know why this happens, maybe because the RTX 2060 is not powerful enough to play back such clear video with no compression artifacts at such a high FPS? But the videos play fine without freezing, at speeds above about 40%, which I find strange.  Could it be a sync issue with the media players trying to keep the video in sync with the audio?

My main concern really is not transcode times, although faster transcode times would always be much appreciated.

I am mainly concerned with stopping this freezing effect that happens when I try and slow down a Rife or SVP transcoded 4k video below 40% or so playback speed after it has been run through an AI video enhancement software filter. 

Would upgrading to say a Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card help in this regard?

Would it make more sense for me to get a desktop with the more powerful version of Nvidia's graphics cards rather than a laptop with the less powerful versions?

Would getting a CPU with a higher base processor speed than 2.3-2.6 ghz have any effect on either transcode times or the playback ability of MPV or MPC or VLC?

Do I need a certain type or level of graphics card or a threshold cpu processor speed for my laptop or desktop to be able to output 4k at 120hz smoothly to an external monitor or TV using either a DP to HDMI 2.1 adapter, a Thunderbolt to HDMI 2.1 adapter, or even just an HDMI 2.1 port?

I probably have more questions that I can't think of at the moment.  I know this is a lot of blather to read from someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about and is probably saying a lot of silly things out of ignorance, but any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks very much! I am a huge fan of SVP! It's a great piece of software!

2 Reply by Ante85 (edited by Ante85 28-05-2022 15:23:17)

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Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

About the shoppyness. Will it occur in a different interval if you change the fps in your computer? Many have the option to change from 60 to 50 or 59. I had that issue a long time. The shoppyness occured every 17,5 seconds throughout the whole video at 59.997 and every 5 minutes at 59,937. No players could fix it. It whent so long so I even got a warranty repair from HP that did not fix the issue a week ago. But when I dragged the video into SVP some days ago, and choosed the video profile ignore HFR sources, it worked perfect. Even the colours was much better when it was transcoded using the lvfi tonemap and played with the ignore HFR sources profile and not with other players.

That can possibly be a fix.

About computers. Buying a desctop is always preferable than a laptop. The reason is becouse of the hardware throttling that they performe in laptops.

Say that you use a CPU model and a NVIDIA model in a laptop, and you have the same CPU and NVIDIA card in a desktop. The performance of the laptop will be a lot less. In the GTX series they called this throttle "Max-Q" and the NVIDIA card is not even a real extended card, it was intergrated in the motherboard in HP computers wile in desktops the NVIDIA card is an extended version with its own fan. So in the laptops you have one fan that will cool both the cpu and the NVIDIA and if the NVIDIA get to hot, then your motherboard will get damaged, and they solve that so the NVIDIA will drain lot less watts and that is why the performance is less. The intel CPU throttling is called T somthing mode. In the RTX series NVIDIA have stopped do MAx-Q models, so now it is the OEM that does them, so now you can not even see how much watt they will drain and how less the performance will be.

Upgrading your NVIDIA is not needed when even my GTX 1650 can do what you want to do. I use AVCLabs.

3 Reply by forgetikiss (edited by forgetikiss 01-06-2022 00:20:50)

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

Ignore HFR sources does seem to help in some ways, although there is still choppyness.

It may be that 240 FPS and setting my MPV config file to have a frame rate display rate of 240.0 FPS is too much for 4k video at least with the computer that I have.

Switching off and on hardware acceleration seems to have some effect as well, with hardware acceleration on in MPV with D3113d seeming to help at speeeds lower than .15 or .14 and turning hardware acceleration off seems to work well for speeds above .18

I really am mostly going to resign myself to the fact that I may just be pushing this software too hard and it's probably not worth it for me to spend a huge amount of time trying to optimize playback at these speeds and frame ratings and FPS display settings.

Thank you very much for your suggestions and advice, was very helpful and much appreciated!

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

In my previous post I mistakenly said hardware acceleration when I meant hardware decoding!

5 Reply by UHD (edited by UHD 02-06-2022 16:30:20)

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Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

If you want to use the RIFE algorithm for interpolation then only desktop!

Look at the difference in performance for:

GeForce 30 (30xx) series for desktops
and
GeForce 30 (30xx) series for laptops

in this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series

compare the data in the columns named:
Tensor TFLOPS

It is the performance of the Tensor Cores that determines the speed of interpolation with RIFE.

Also consider waiting 3 months for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080: https://videocardz.com/newz/rumor-nvidi … in-october the price should be similar to RTX 3080, and the performance of the 4th generation Tensor Cores will increase dramatically looking at the performance of the first accelerator based on these cores - NVIDIA H100:

FP16 Tensor Core: 2000 teraFLOPS (with sparsity)
https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-tensor-core

Graphics card prices are falling all the time, so it's worth waiting anyway:
https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-2829-mai-2022

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

UHD - Thank you very much for the feedback.  I am wondering, with whatever graphics card you have, how many fps can you get when transcoding a 4k or 1080p video with rife in SVP?


Also, I seemed to have found some kind of solution for the video choppyness/stuttering when played back at very slow speeds.

In the MPV config file I changed this setting: "video-sync-max-video-change=5"

to =0 and that seemed to help a lot, the videos run a lot smoother at slower speeds although occassionaly they may still stutter, it seems much improved from before.

I have no idea why this works or what the setting is, it seems to have something to do with a reclock replacement in MPV or something, I have no idea.


I am just glad it seems to work well now!

Thank you very much everyone for all your help with this!

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

forgetikiss wrote:

UHD - Thank you very much for the feedback.  I am wondering, with whatever graphics card you have, how many fps can you get when transcoding a 4k or 1080p video with rife in SVP?


Also, I seemed to have found some kind of solution for the video choppyness/stuttering when played back at very slow speeds.

In the MPV config file I changed this setting: "video-sync-max-video-change=5"

to =0 and that seemed to help a lot, the videos run a lot smoother at slower speeds although occassionaly they may still stutter, it seems much improved from before.

I have no idea why this works or what the setting is, it seems to have something to do with a reclock replacement in MPV or something, I have no idea.


I am just glad it seems to work well now!

Thank you very much everyone for all your help with this!

Check rife thread. For example 3060 can do 1080p x2, 3070ti - 1440p x2

8 Reply by UHD (edited by UHD 03-06-2022 15:42:04)

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Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

forgetikiss wrote:

video choppyness/stuttering when played back at very slow speeds.

The best you can do is this (audio must be disabled or adjusted in some additional program):

1. It is best to use a monitor with FreeSync or G-Sync support and enable it.
2. If you have video: 29.97 fps transcode it only once and only with RIFE using multiplier x10, the resulting file will have 299.7 fps.

The maximum frame rate supported by HEVC is 300 fps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Effi … deo_Coding

3. Set your monitor to exactly 60.000Hz or rely on FreeSync or G-Sync. The latter is the best solution.
4. Change lossless fps from 299.7 fps to 60 fps if you want to watch 5x slower or 30 fps if you want to watch 10x slower. Use the raw bitstream method described in the following link:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/How%20to%2 … 0a%20video

If you slow down in the player to some random value like 0.15 then don't be surprised if you get some stuttering. If you have a file encoded to 299.7 fps then choose either 0.2 (which gives 59.94 fps) or 0.1 (which gives 29.97 fps) and be sure to set the monitor to 59.94Hz. In any other case, you will have stuttering if you do not set your monitor exactly to the resulting fps or its exact double or triple. This is what FreeSync or G-Sync is for.

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

I am not surprised at the stuttering but I do think it is possible to mostly eliminate it.

At least I hope so. As I've progressed with computers different technical specs like moving from intel integrated graphics to a dedicated graphics card I've noticed the ability of MPV to play transcoded video files at slow speeds has improved, the stuttering has decreased.

Right now I am using a laptop with a Nvidia RTX 2060 and there is still some stuttering with files that have been run through an AI filter to remove compression and noise artifacts.

I am about to use in a few days a desktop with a Nvidia RTX 3060 TI and a base clock speed of 3.6 ghz along with Windows 11 home. I am hoping this will eliminate the stuttering I am seeing with the RTX 2060 laptop.

If not, I guess I could always upgrade the graphics card at some point in the future.  This will be the first desktop I have purchased in over two decades!

I will let you guys know how the playback goes with the desktop Nvidia 3060 TI!

10 Reply by forgetikiss (edited by forgetikiss 17-06-2022 09:15:48)

Re: Any guidance for a SVP user in the market for a new laptop/desktop?

Hello!

I have used this new PC and the video at slow speeds does continue to stutter, although I am still fiddling around with the settings!

There are a bunch of solutions I have found while trying to play these transcoded videos on this other laptop I have been using.

The continued stuttering makes me think that even if I had gotten a RTX 3080 graphics card, I likely would have continued to have the same issues.

The awesome news is that in regards to transcoding times. transcoding fps has basically more than doubled for rife (sometimes tripled) and probably even more for the SVP algorithm, which is really cool!

I will also try overclocking the GPU to see if that helps, but I suspect it probably won't.

Who knows, I think this is more an issue with Nvidia and developers of MPV not encountering someone like me who has this playback stuttering problem only with very specifically, video files that have had their noise and compression and other artifacts mostly removed through an AI filter.  I think if developers were aware and ready to work on this issue, they probably could find a way to remove the stuttering. But who knows, I really don't know what I am talking about and it may just be a real playback limitation with graphics cards when the quality of the video is high and without much compression artifacts.

Anyways, there are a lot of bizarre workarounds that seem to reduce the stuttering like multiplying the FPS in real time using the SVP algorithm to something ridiculous to like above 700 fps, even above 1000 FPS, and setting the MPV display rate to like 1500 FPS, for some videos, for some reason, this can seem to give smoother playback.

Also if you have a 700 fps transcoded video and then try and get SVP to use the SVP algorithm to REDUCE the FPS to like 165 FPS, sometimes that results in smoother playback as well!

Bizarelly, it seems like each video is not alike, and one method will not necessarily work for another, if they work at all.

If anyone has any tips and tricks, if I am doing something really silly (which is highly possible, lol!), or any other ideas, definitely would be awesome to hear!

Thanks a lot again all you guys for all the help and for SVP, which is just an amazing program!


Edit: It also seems like messing with the two "reclock replacement" configuration settings in the mpv config file can help smooth the playback at slow speeds as well!