In recent builds we've introduced pre-defined quality levels for Red October HQ, which lets you pick settings appropriate for a wider range of hardware, or for improved image quality.
In Media Center 24.0.68, we've further refined and renamed these settings. In Build 68 and above, you can find them under Settings -> Video -> Quality Setting (before 24.0.68, the settings have a slightly different name)
Activating a Quality Setting preset will overwrite any custom madVR settings you may have made, and restore everything to defaults.
In the past, we've often recommended to use Red October Standard on low-end hardware, however RO HQ enables handling 3D or HDR videos even without opting into the higher quality features, so it was important for us to enable a built-in method to play such videos without complicated customizations.
Currently we offer 3 profiles:
Best Performance, designed for low-end or integrated graphics cards
This setting was specifically designed to be able to run Red October HQ on low-end integrated Intel GPUs, and should work out of the box even on 4K HDR. For the best experience, we recommend enabling "Hardware acceleted video decoding" as well as "Optimize hardware decoding for performance" (the option is only available in RO HQ mode)
Balanced, the old default mode
This setting reflects the RO HQ default we've had for years. A decent quality enhancement over RO Standard, but still very easy on the hardware, and very close to the default settings of madVR itself.
Best Quality, for mid-range dedicated graphics cards
The Best Quality setting uses the best "conventional" upscalers available in Red October HQ, namely "Jinc". It offers a decent upgrade in quality in almost all situations over the Balanced setting, while still being pretty moderate on the GPU power requirements. This setting does not use any of the advanced "doublers" available in madVR, because proper use of those requires precise tailoring to your GPU, screen size, and the content you watch - and they tend to be very aggressive on hardware requirements.
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We will refine these profiles in the future as needed, but in initial testing these settings have shown a great improvement for the RO HQ experience. Specifically the "Best Performance" setting, in conjunction with the new performance optimized hardware decoding, allows a wide variety of systems to play modern content without a lot of customized tweaking.