AI Upscalers Can Work Wonders On Old Games & Movies

Since the introduction of Magnific, creators and artists have been having a field day finding ways to upscale old games and movies to 8K resolution. Some of the results have been quite impressive such as this demonstration on a PS1 version of Tomb Raider and upscaled PS1 edition of Metal Gear Solid.

Given the speed of progress, it is increasingly likely that AI upscalers may have a place in graphics and streaming rendering pipelines where they can be used to automatically alter the appearance of films, video games and broadcasts in real time.

For the time being, generating images like this takes a few seconds, but advancements such as the recently announced SD Turbo models can speed things up to real-time performance.

Here are a few examples of what is possible today with Magnific:

Street Fighter upscaled

Metal Gear Solid for PS1 Upscaled via Magnific

Tomb Raider for PS1 upscaled with Magnific

Upscaling Metropolis (1927)

I have written previously that I believe upscaling and restoring public domain movies is an interesting project. Here are a few experiments with Magnific to demonstrate upgrading Metropolis to a modern 8K resolution while mostly preserving the look and feel of the original.

Source image:

Throne Room from the 1927 movie

Zoom in of the robotic torso

Here is the scaled up version showing the difference. I used the following settings:

Settings:

• Creativity: 3
• HDR: 0
• Resemblance: -1

Prompt: screenshot, (detailed robot:1.2), (detailed face:1.1), (throne room:1.2), sci fi futuristic, 8k, bokeh, blade runner

Ran the scaling process twice, second pass used Creativity 1