garageCube

I am really amazed at madMapper's ability to play back so many layers of video, generators, masks and effects in real time. But I sometimes wonder if there is any loss of image quality as a trade-off. Can you tell me if madMapper drops frames or lowers the output resolution somehow in order to achieve real-time playback of complex projects? Would it be better to export multilayered scenes through Syphon Recorder and re-import them into madMapper to ensure the best image quality possible?

there's no downsampling going on, ever.
MadMapper will drop the framerate when the gfx card can't handle more, so it depends on your gfx card, amount of pixels rendered etc.... So basically if it is too slow, you could downsample yourself by rendering at 720p and outputing at 1080p (via the projector tab).

If you're using cpu codecs for video, at some point the cpu won't handle either ...

As a precision: MadMapper handles backward video playback properly in CPU because we handle our own frame buffer and we keep few last frames (up to a certain amount of memory) and prepare future frames in a separated thread. But for sure quality isn't reduced, all pixels are in the GPU, we just try to get the best out of your hardware. For best movie decompression performances, use HAP codec.

Thank you for the detailed reply! It's very reassuring to know madMapper preserves the video quality during playback.
Awesome software!

as a sidenote, if you export your video to the minimad, some downsampling might occur in order to preserve playback fluidity.
that's an option you can de-activate tho', under advanced export options.