Monday, July 26, 2021

The Verge - Entertainments

The Verge - Entertainments

This YouTube channel is using AI to gloriously remaster classic game cutscenes

Posted: 25 Jul 2021 04:53 PM PDT

Twenty years ago, when photorealistic games were still just a faraway dream, companies like Square sent our imaginations soaring before we played, with big-budget intros and cutscenes. Long before Overwatch normalized the practice of releasing Pixar-quality animated shorts for each new character, Blizzard's Diablo II and Capcom's Onimusha 3 put us in the demon slaying mood with incredible mini-movies stretching to six minutes each.

But if you dare try watching these classics on a modern 4K TV or even a 1080p monitor, they'll look like a pixelated mess. That's where a YouTube channel named Upscale and machine learning comes in — making them look nearly as good as they did on your old CRT. Or perhaps even better. It just depends how well the game's art style works with the AI algorithms bringing it back to life.

The Kingdom Hearts intros, for instance, look incredible. I scanned around, and I'm willing to call these the definitive versions currently in existence:

You have to check out the hair in World of Warcraft's intro. It left me in awe, and the video includes a before-and-after comparison, too:

Here's the legendary six-minute Onimusha 3 opening cinematic at 4K 60 fps. It's not perfect, but it's the best I've ever seen it. More than good enough to share with people who need to understand this piece of gaming history.

And here's 1999's Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver in 8K. Can you believe this is a PS1 game?

Upscale can't quite seem to nail Chrono Cross, I'm afraid, but its second or third stab at Chrono Trigger looks pretty amazing:

And I'm not particularly fond of Upscale's attempt at Dirge of Cerberus. Thankfully a handful of other YouTube channels are also trying these machine learning techniques, and I think The Gaming Restoration nailed it.

These enhancements are all made possible through a piece of software called Topaz Video Enhance AI, aka Topaz Gigapixel, and we've written a bit about it before — it's the same generated adversarial network technique some modders are using to upscale the graphics of playable games themselves, now applied to their cutscenes as well. For $299, the company will sell you an app that can spit out videos like these in a handful of hours, depending on your PC's GPU, how long, and how high a resolution you need. I know, because I took it for a spin with a handful of anime music videos and game trailers myself, and was impressed just how easy it could be.

The important thing to know, though, is the images the computer spits out aren't necessarily "truth" — it can invent details that aren't there, or smudge ones that are, in the sometimes-inappropriate pursuit of clarity. I found 4K videos would sometimes look better than 8K, and you really have to pick the right algorithm for the content you're trying to upscale and compare quick previews before you commit.

Here's two different algorithms trying to enhance the same scene in Gundam Wing, so you can see what I mean.

Topaz's "high quality" setting gets rid of the intentional blur / bokeh and flattens the image.
A lower quality "aliased and moire" setting does a more faithful job at the expense of clarity.

To be clear, these are both enhanced images, but one is arguably wrong: this is an ethereal, dream-like sequence where the background is supposed to be soft and blurred, not sharp and flat. Of course, the algorithm doesn't know that.

If you'd like to see a couple examples where I tried to enhance some old content myself, click here and here, and make sure to change your YouTube quality setting. ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska also has a great series about trying to remaster Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Truth be told, I've hesitated to write about Upscale for The Verge, because I figured lawyers would shut it down any minute, or Upscale's creators would get bored and stop posting. But I've been waiting and watching for nearly a year, and it hasn't gone away yet. If you're a big video game industry executive, would you perhaps consider not firing ze copyright missiles?

At least until you've done a better job of remastering these cutscenes yourself, I mean.

Doctor Who’s 13th season is a single story, and here’s the first trailer

Posted: 25 Jul 2021 12:19 PM PDT

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed Doctor Who to do something it hasn't done in the modern era — dedicate an entire season to a single story. That's the word from showrunner Chris Chibnall in a new Doctor Who panel at the online-only San Diego Comic-Con today. Oh, and did I mention we're getting our very first fleeting glimpse at Series 13 in a teaser trailer? Hit that video play button above to watch it.

We'd learned last year that the new season would just be eight episodes long, but Chibnall says it pushed the BBC to go big: "The big thing that we're going to be doing this year is it's all one story, so every episode is one chapter in a bigger story," he says.

More:

There were two ways you could go: we're just going to do lots of tiny episodes in one room with no monsters, or we could throw down the gauntlet and go "we're going to do the biggest story we've ever done, we're going to go all kinds of different places, we're going to have all kinds of characters and monsters, and it's all going to be part of a bigger whole." I think it's definitely the most ambitious thing we've done since we've been on the series.

While many previous seasons of Doctor Who slowly introduce a mystery and then resolve it by the end ("Bad Wolf," the crack in the wall, and so on), this sounds a bit different.

Want to watch the panel yourself? It's free and features stars Jodie Whittaker (The Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yas), and new cast members John Bishop and Jacob Anderson too! (Anderson played Grey Worm in Game of Thrones, if you're wondering why he looks familiar.)

Here you go:

Don't expect any spoilers, though: "We pick it up with the Doctor and Yas who've been traveling together for some time, we come and meet them mid-adventure, and they stumble across some man named Dan Lewis, that's all I'm going to tell you," says Chibnall.

The show actually teased Dan Lewis, Bishop's character, during the holiday special on January 1st:

Whittaker's only hint for Whovians: she's most looking forward to "some incredible interactions with old monsters," too. We don't have a release date for Series 13 yet, just that it'll be out later this year, and likely exclusively streaming on HBO Max and BBC America in the US.

The Steam Deck has an ‘optional built-in FPS limiter’ for better battery life

Posted: 25 Jul 2021 09:51 AM PDT

When Valve and IGN revealed last Thursday that the new Steam Deck handheld will target 30Hz gameplay, not everyone was impressed with that low bar — but Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has taken to Twitter to clarify his original comment, and reveal a new feature of the portable console.

First, he says 30 fps is more of a minimum bar than anything else:

@Plagman2 (Twitter)

"The '30 FPS target' refers to the floor of what we consider playable in our performance testing; games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far," he writes.

In other words, when Griffais said in that IGN video interview that "We haven't really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle," you shouldn't take it to mean that every modern game runs at 60 fps. Expect less.

Intriguingly, a 30 fps mode will be something you can proactively turn on to get more battery life, too. "There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf vs. battery life," he writes. The company's already said you can play Portal 2 for up to six hours at 30fps, compared to four hours normally.

Will it be a good 30 fps mode, though? That's TBD. In the replies, Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter says Valve confirmed to him that the Steam Deck doesn't have a variable-refresh-rate (VRR) screen, and eludes to the idea that V-sync might wind up creating some nasty frame pacing issues if you try to lock games to 30Hz on the Deck's screen. (Digital Foundry would know; it's covered the issue many times across PC and console. Dark Souls and Sekiro developer From Software is notorious for inconsistent frame-pacing, for example.)

Griffais hasn't replied yet. We'll see!

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