Also he said he had to do a custom LAV/MadVR setup because he said he had too many frames dropped.
If he was able to fix the frame dropping by tweaking LAV/MavVR, perhaps JRiver should review the default settings.
I was thinking about this too.
I think the issue there is that they're testing on a SFF box. The new ASRock 3D is no slouch, but it is still just a dual-core Sandy Bridge with a low-end laptop GPU. It just can't quite handle the very high-quality settings of ROHQ.
But does changing ROHQ to work here (which will be lower-quality for people who have brand new desktop-class GPUs and quad-core CPUs) make a whole lot of sense? Perhaps for MC18 the answer is to make a three-tier Red October system.
ROST - Baseline. Good quality. Works on everything, even an older PC or a netbook with an Atom.
ROMQ - Mainstream. LAV/MadVR. Tuned to work well on your "average" Sandy Core i3/i5 with a low-end 3rd party GPU, or an Ivy with onboard graphics.
ROHQ - High-end. Full-sized ATX class performance. Tuned for Quad-Core CPUs and current-gen $200+ GPUs.
PS. Even better would be if it would detect the performance of your system on first launch, and set itself to the mode most suited to the system at hand. It doesn't have to be perfect (conservative is better), but something like what most modern games do to "optimize quality" for a particular system would be great.