Thanks. Does that mean anything less than GDDR5 GPU's are a no-no?
I have an ATI HD5450 GPU...
I think you'll be fine with that card. The author of MadVR (which is the main component of Red October HQ) has done a very good job of optimizing the algorithms in the last few versions. The best way to see for sure is just to try it out. MadVR works very well across a wide range of hardware, it all depends on the scaling algorithms you choose to use. I'd say about 80% of the performance depends on which image upscaling algorithm you use, and 10% the chroma scaling algorithm, and another 10% depending on what options you have selected in the trade quality for performance menu (such as using 10 bit buffers instead of 16).
A good starting point is to use mitchell-net for chroma upscaling and softcubic 70/bicubic 60 (very similar performance between the two, it's your personal preference on image quality. Bicubic is sharper but adds some aliasing and artifacts, softcubic is soft but actually hides artifacts without blurring detail) for image upscaling with none of the options in trade quality for performance selected. While watching a video (and test on your highest bitrate, most demanding videos
that are NOT 1080p. That's vitally important, if you test a 1080p video you will be bypassing the need for image upscaling), hit CTRL+J to bring up the MadVR status menu. Look at the line that says v-sync interval. Note the number it says in milliseconds. Then look down below to average stats. Monitor those numbers for about 10 seconds and then add up the numbers shown there in milliseconds. As long as those add up to less than the v-sync interval, your performance is good. And you will see that reflected by the fact that the counter for dropped and skipped frames stays steady and is not increasing. You'll want at least a 10% buffer zone on the peformance numbers, maybe even 20% if you are decoding your videos on your CPU and not the GPU.
If you have a good amount of headroom, you can experiment with higher quality settings, like lanczos 3 or 4 tap (4 tap preferred) with the anti-ringing filter enabled on both the chroma and image upscaling. If you need a slight boost in performance, experiment with settings in the trade quality for performance menu. Enabling the two options that mention using a 10-bit buffer instead of 16-bit is an easy way to gain a small boost in performance with little to no reduction in image quality.
I have a low powered APU from 2011, whose GPU is probably even slower than what you have. I also have to use GPU-assisted H264 decoding which further drains the available GPU power for MadVR. Still, I have no issues running MadVR with Mitchell-Net / Softcubic 70, there is plenty of performance overhead available. If it were only a little faster I could do Lanczos 3-tap with the anti-ringing filter enabled.
Oh, and enabling Fullscreen Exclusive mode is recommended with MadVR. Look for it in the MadVR settings.
