ideas for specialK

[Plex]

Since SpecialK is already able to dump and inject textures I was thinking if we were able to upscale textures in real time automatically with a waifu, xBRZ or other hq filter.
I know this would probably take a long processing time on newer games or games that have a lot of textures.
But I was thinking about older games or indie games that have lower res textures, also 2D scrollers like Ori and the Blind Forest to make them look better at 4k resolutions.

I know Kaldaien is still busy finishing other stuff, but I just suggested this idea for the future.

[Kaldaien]

Real-time? No :) This is one of those GPGPU applications that actually have something to do with graphics.

This is an interesting idea, though. The only way I see this being practical is if you use the in-game texture editor to preview various dfferent algorithms to figure out which one would deliver the best results and then you dedicate the necessary offline GPU compute time to textures that need the most work. Of course there's no substitute for a good artist. I like to think these tools complement rather than replace artists.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but for Tales of Symphonia, that texture mod was about a month's worth of effort. Developing the tools to extract ALL of the textures, then crunching the numbers on 3 GTX 980 GPUs I had lying around.

I like the idea, but I think sights need to be set a little bit lower, because consumer hardware's not at the point where this is a real-time application yet.

[Plex]

Dolphin and PPSSPP can do it in realtime, but the textures are lower res than on most PC games anyway.
but it should be meant for older games or lower res textures anyway.

[Aemony]

I assume you're talking about various pixel scaling algorithms like HQ2x, HQ4x, 2xSaI, etc? ReShade already supports some of those, I believe.

But forget about waifu2x. It uses deep convolutional neural networks to determine what to scale and how to scale it. That requires far too much processing power to perform in realtime at the moment, and it would probably result in a horrible result since it by design is targeted towards anime-style art and not "general" and low-res textures from old games.

[Plex]

Originally posted by Aemony:

I assume you're talking about various pixel scaling algorithms like HQ2x, HQ4x, 2xSaI, etc? ReShade already supports some of those, I believe.

Yes, and it can scale up individual textures??
I thought only as post process for the entire screen that helps for games like Undertale etc..

[Aemony]

It's probably post-processing still, sadly. Aren't Dolphin and PPSSPP applying them post-processing as well?

[Kaldaien]

Yeah, Reshade is entirely screenspace post-processing. It takes a rendered 2D image and works on that. Textures are not part of what Reshade does.

The problem here is that stuff like Waifu can take 3-4 minutes on some of these games :) Final Fantasy, Tales of ... and so forth used to use pre-rendered background textures that could be as large as 1024x1024. That sounds good, but they desperately need MORE resolution than that and can't get it wtihout a lengthy offline upscale.


Even for games that don't have excessively large textures, many can load as many as a thousand textures in ~5 seconds. That'll destroy performance if you have to upscale those in serial. At which point the texture streaming system I built for Tales of Symphonia becomes essential :)

Mind you, Tales of Symphonia's streaming system was simply to hide the lengthy load times from reading a texture 16x the game's original resolution. It could also hide upscaling latency.

[Plex]

Originally posted by Aemony:

Aren't Dolphin and PPSSPP applying them post-processing as well?

no, they apply them directly to the textures, but in some games it can mess up the transparency and you see artifacts around fonts or sprites.