I think you are really on to something here. It would be amazing to see some of the retro Sega classic arcade games such as Space Harrier and Turbo Out Run in 4K!

Q2VKPT seems like a rich area of research. If the entire pipeline could be automated. Using efficient subdivision surfaces and deep learning to intelligently predict light-transport simulation. Then we would merely have to input the game assets of a classic game title. And the output would look like Bioware's Anthem ;)

What about.. AI-powered texture compression.

Train the game upscaling AI with high resolution textures, then ship the game with lower res textures. High quality rendering with smaller file sizes, though won't be as good as the original pictures.

Not very useful in reality, but would be a pretty neat proof of concept.

The question is: would the AI data be smaller than shipping the high quality textures in the first place?

Textures usually ship compressed in a format that is supported by the hardware. Hardware texture compression saves a lot of bandwidth and therefore improves runtime performance. That compression step is done offline and it's slow enough not to do it on the client's side, otherwise just using ordinary JPEG compression would reduce file sizes substantially.

Shipping size is usually not the limiting factor for texture size, GPU memory is. Texture compression must work on small blocks for random pixel addressing.

Which doesn't entirely rule out a deep learning based compressor, just makes it much harder :)

Why use repeated textures? Just provide a low resolution "pattern definition", say some blades of grass, and fresh unique textures could be generated by a network. probably pretty computationally cheap too

Fwiw, I have seen a NN texture compressor that is compatible with game engines and doesn’t require any AI data to decompress. I can’t give any details because it’s not my project and not published yet. I just wanted to say I know for a fact that your idea there is a good one. ;)

Check out Nvidia DLSS

It would be especially neat to see this done for 3d models.

There are plenty of texture upgrades available for Quake, but I haven't really seen any model updates.

Agree, if you add highres textures to old games you quickly reach a point where it just feels less consistent than before, because everything is pretty low tech and then you have these out of place photorealistic textures. It might just be me, considering how popular high res texture packs for Minecraft are. I always felt the stock ones or at least those that tried to mimic the 8 bit style looked best.

So yes, upgrading models and even the level geometry would be very cool IMO.

Depends how well it’s done. Check out https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-15 for Quake (I), for example.

I guess spotting an upscaled image will soon be pretty much impossible without making your eyes sore or employing another NN. So much for trying to preserve originals on the web.

I think the method employed is called ESRGAN (Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks)