Alternative models?

[YellowOnion]

Hey, so I think the weapon textures look great, but the world textures can look a bit weird in some situations.

As mentioned in another issue, some textures are rather noisy, and I wonder if some of the dedither models could help here, the 4xFSDedither variants look pretty good, https://upscale.wiki/wiki/Model_Database#Dithering

There's also the HDCube scaler looks promising.

I'm on AMD and Linux so I'm not really sure how to extract textures from Q2 or run pytorch on my hardware, I would love to do some comparisons otherwise.

[Calinou]

Related to #4.

Feel free to experiment with other models, but it's important that the sense of detail and "grittiness" is not lost on the world textures. As for skies, I think running a simple denoising pass would do the trick. I used GIMP's denoising filter for the weapon textures, but I haven't found a way to run it automatically on all textures.

I'm on AMD and Linux so I'm not really sure how to extract textures from Q2 or run pytorch on my hardware, I would love to do some comparisons otherwise.

You can run https://github.com/joeyballentine/ESRGAN on the CPU with the --cpu command line argument. It'll be slower compared to running it on a GPU, but it should still complete 🙂

https://github.com/joeyballentine/ESRGAN also has options to handle seamless textures and transparency, so it should be much more convenient compared to https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN.

[YellowOnion]

Is wally the only app available for texture extraction? might have to use wine which I would rather not.

[Calinou]

Is wally the only app available for texture extraction? might have to use wine which I would rather not.

I used SLADE to export folders of textures within the PAKs to PNG images. It works well, but unfortunately, you have to extract them folder-by-folder as I couldn't find a way to do it recursively. This was back in December 2019, so maybe it changed since then.

[JH828]

Wouldn't play Q2 without this mod. But maybe it can be improved.
I'd go with Real-ESRGAN which is newer and much faster, run the realesrgan-4xplus and then realesrgan-4xplus-anime on the first upscale if things end up blurry, then downscale if needed. But there are newer models available out there, up to you ofc.