Okay, we all know DOOM turned 25 earlier this month, and we know how legendary the modding community is with the game. But, as you know, a 25-year-old game’s graphics are usually not going to compare to today’s games. So, what’s a DOOM fan to do?
Enter Doomworld user Hidfan and his mod, which features upscaled graphics for all of the textures in the game. The cool (and scary) thing about this mod is the fact that it uses Nvidia’s GameWorks SuperResolution in conjunction with Photoshop plugin Topaz AI Gigapixel to upscale the graphics. In other words, an AI was able to take 1993 graphics, scale them up 8x, and then all Hidfan had to do was downscale them to 2x size and do some cleanup.
It’s not a perfect process, mind you. “A lot of textures have been manually cleaned of AI artefacts [sic] and all transparency masks have to be manually enhanced (because AI don’t [sic] know what to do with binary Black & White yet).”
Still, it’s certainly better-looking than what the longtime process entailed of making old-school pixel-based graphics look higher res than they were ever intended. And it doesn’t have that smeared Vaseline look, either.
