[Hardware] How AI Makes Your Old Games Look Better Than Ever

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Do you have an old game and you don't like the way it looks? Well, thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms you can improve their appearance and give them a new life. That is why we explain in this article what artificial intelligence brings to old games. If you want to know how AI improves the visual quality of classics of yesteryear, keep reading.

 There are video games that age very badly and that over time do not manage to maintain the type, others are great classics but the current high resolutions do not suit them at all and end up tarnishing their image quality, and by the way the memory we have of them.

Many of these games will not have an improved version, be it a remake or a reboot. The motives? On the one hand, the game you like so much may have been a commercial fiasco, on the other hand, the studio that originally made it went bankrupt years ago and the original code has been lost in the trash to never be recovered.

Whatever the case, the same technology used in artificial intelligence is used to increase the resolution in games can also be used to improve the visual quality of old games and not only in order to improve the output resolution but also in the game assets.

Greater variety in old game textures

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One type of artificial intelligence is generative, which is based on generating new data patterns from other known data. These artificial intelligences do not have a second AI acting as a supervisor or discriminator of the result.

In the games of yesteryear due to the limitation of VRAM memory, 3D games were limited in terms of the resolution of the textures and their color depth, in addition in many cases the same mosaic texture was used for fill an entire surface.

Artificial intelligence algorithms allow an existing texture to be used as a base to generate more complex versions or variants of the same that give a greater visual variety to the appearance of the game with little effort and without losing its original visual style. The result is a better version of the original game.

Higher texture resolution in older games via artificial intelligence
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A texture in the background is nothing more than a two-dimensional image that the GPU places on a 3D surface that we call a polygon, so at the data processing level it is no different than when a super-resolution increase is applied to a complete image to obtain another, although this requires training the AI with a series of images that it can use to learn a generalized pattern.

One of the most popular AIs for improving both the output resolution and the quality of the textures is ESRGAN, which has been used to improve the visual quality of many of the older games, especially those that are designed for sub-resolutions. HD and whose interpolation at higher resolutions gives inadequate visual results, not to say horrifying.

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However, despite working in a very similar way to the super-resolution algorithms, we find that the textures do not have to be defined in real time and they are already in the game installation files, so it is a lot easier to convert to higher quality of all textures in the game.

These changes not only affect the quality of textures in old games, but also elements designed at a specific resolution such as menus, markers and other elements of the game interface.

What is needed to improve games via artificial intelligence?
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It depends on what we are talking about, if we talk about playing the games at a higher resolution, obviously the frame has been generated at the base resolution, but, it is possible that the game is old enough so that the CPU, GPU or hardware that you are using, have plenty of time to generate the higher resolution version of the frame without affecting the frame rate.

As for the increase in the resolution of the textures and other elements of the game, this is not done in real time, so you can calmly make your PC carry out the task of improving the quality of the textures of the game while you are away gaming without the need for a next-generation GPU and even less acceleration hardware for artificial intelligence.