[Cinder]

If you can't see the difference in picture quality, turn up your settings. With a GTX 960, you could use NNEDI3 for both chroma and luma, if you wanted.

You will see the smallest improvement in 1080p rips, but the difference is still there. Turn off debanding as it strips away some detail. The same can be said for Smooth Motion. Basically, if you aren't satisfied with your settings, then change to a different scaling algorithm that looks good to you. Jinc3 + AR can appear soft to some people (at least, at 1080p). Jinc4 or Lanczos3-4 might look better to your eyes.

There are hundreds of combinations of settings available in madVR. That is what separates it from many renderers. But I would agree, with some content, the difference is not immediately apparent. After you have watched content for year, like me, I bet you will not want to go back. It is easy to see the difference. Or maybe I just like what its scaling looks like.

I tried NNEDI3 on my desktop (trying to find my preferred settings before migrating them to HTPC), and indeed I can see some improvements when switching back to "nearest neighbor" for instance. Differences between the other algorithms are really hard for me to spot, say between Jinc and NNEDI33. I tested this on a very low res video though (512x384), which leaves me wondering - which resolutions does madVR really shine at 720p upscaling to 1080p?

I also found now that the madVR setting changes are in fact instantaneous to the played video, which I was unable to see on 1080p material. Still, I am getting dropped frames when running with SVP as well, any suggestions on solving that?

And finally I get no subtitles in Kodi to show now that I'm running SVP with FFDShow Raw and madVR..?

In any case, many thanks for your help, I'm sure I will be able to set this up to be fantastic with a little help.