When VP 22 was released and the Magix team said that Vegas Effects would no longer be supported I held back on upgrading as I had just started my third project where I needed a compositor like Vegas Effects to do a lot of effect shots. But, this was also the time when I was starting to make vertical formatted content and ran into consistent crashing and other weird bugs when converting 16x9 video into 9x16 so I ended up upgrading to VP 22 and have been switching between the two versions since.
Magix announcing that the big changes were just to playback smoothness with VP 23 I was again skeptical and have held back on my upgrade as I was fine with the performance I was getting from VP 22. I was ready to upgrade if a few features that have been circulating these forums were addressed, mainly a very much needed update to the ancient text and titles tool that doesn't look like it has seen an improvement from when I first touched Vegas when it still went by Sony Vegas and came pre-loaded on a Vaio laptop I bought for school.
However, I decided to give VP 23 a try and downloaded the trial edition. Some menus are a little slower to load, mainly opening their new color grading does not seem as snappy as it was in VP 22 but waiting an extra half second or so is fine.
The file I was using was not ideal for VP 22, 1440p with 10 bit color for HDR. In VP 22, the only way to get relatively smooth playback was to set the resolution down to auto and watch 1440p turn into sub 640p and still have occasional hitches whenever I crossed a point I cut around. Trying the same file in VP 23, it handled the file flawlessly and played it back in full resolution with no discernable frame drops. This has always been an irk for me as other NLE's allow for this kind of smooth playback so I am very glad that Magix is coming back to par with them.
If there is one critique I would make it would be around the installation process. Needing to click approve and install on every single deep learning module feels clunky, would rather have seen just a general "install all" button.