AI is killing a lot of stuff that didn’t need to die, especially in gaming. But there are some use cases that are helpful and don’t need massive layoffs to justify, such as re-texturing a PS2 game. Carlos Menezes documented the process on his website, using Smackdown vs Raw 2007 as his test subject, PCSX2 as the emulator to extract the textures, and Real-ESRGAN for upscaling.
Real-ESRGAN is an further enhanced version of ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks), a model capable of generating realistic textures during single image super-resolution
. You can judge the results for yourself but I think they came out pretty good. I’ve never seen The Undertaker or Triple H look so sharp.
