We recently covered the good work being done with DOOM and neural net upscaling. It’s not the only game to get a fresh, AI enhanced coat of paint though.
Morrowind Enhanced Textures is a mod that uses, much like Hidfan’s work with DOOM, enhanced super resolution generative adverserial networks to improve the quality of textures. The technique was submitted to a competition at the Perceptual Image Restoration and Manipulation conference in Munich, Germany, last year. You can play around with the source code here, and there’s a lengthy paper on the technique for polymaths to enjoy.
Put simply, it’s a technique that’s designed to produce much higher quality upscaled images than previous methods. When applied to Morrowind, the researchers were able to upscale the textures to four times their original quality while maintaining clarity:
You can download the AI upscaled textures, as well as redone textures from expansions, here or through the Nexus Mods Manager. You’re looking at just over 1.2GB for both packages, or around 936MB just for the upscaled vanilla textures. (You’ll get the best result alongside these other mods that help fix things like shaders, rocks, meshes and so on.)
It’ll be interesting to see what other games can get a quick visual boost by running their textures through the ESRGAN code. We could be looking at a very cheap and cost-efficient way for developers to upscale older games in the next couple of years, provided they have all the original code and assets. But right now, let’s all enjoy a nicer, cleaner Morrowind. (And while we’re at it, can someone give Daggerfall a fresh coat of paint?)
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