You can feed the Ansel "AI Up-Res" system any image you want

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by skacikpl, Dec 13, 2018.

  1. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    For those who don't exactly track Ansel related stuff, here's a rundown:
    https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/new-gfe-features-latest-games-get-ansel-and-highlights/

    Or just this image:
    [​IMG]


    The entire "trick" for feeding it any image you want is to call nvdlisrwrapper.exe from command prompt with path to your image (png or jpg) followed by resolution factor (2 or 4) and integer for what i assume is color mode (1 - monochromatic, 2 - full color).
    For example:
    Code:
    C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA NvDLISR\nvdlisrwrapper.exe D:\testimage.png 4 2
    Which will upscale testimage.png 4 times using the whole AI Res-Up thing in full color.

    Other things to note:
    • To have nvdlisrwrapper installed you need to have Geforce Experience installed and updated
    • It seems that only monochrome mode (which is much, much faster) works on non-RTX cards.
    • Unless image is named in similar fashion as default Ansel screenshots, upscaled image will be dumped as separate file without extension (requires renaming to add .png or .jpg).
    Lastly, if you wish to check this out but command prompt is not your thing - i have made GUI application for nvdlisrwrapper called AI Res Up.
    [​IMG]

    I thought i would share this finding since some people were interested on how this whole AI resolution scaling will turn out, i assume the AI profile has been trained with certain set of games but this doesn't mean it can't work with other types of images.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2018
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  2. Party Poison

    Party Poison Ancient Guru

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    This is pretty damn cool, Thanks!
     
  3. gerardfraser

    gerardfraser Guest

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    Works great for any picture,thanks for sharing.
     
  4. WareTernal

    WareTernal Master Guru

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    This will be really useful for Photoshop. There is a site called 'Let's Enhance' that does this kinda of thing with 2d images.
    If it's true, anyone with a GeForce should be able to upscale this to 1080, which I'd love to see to compare to the original 1080 image.
    https://i.**********/VsnHNwLT/20181212194551-1.png
     

  5. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    I have procured a single set of comparison png shots:
    Native(1920x1080 / 2.12 MB)
    2x Upscale (3840x2160 / 5.12 MB)
    4x Upscale (7680x4320 / 20.9 MB)

    My personal opinion is that both modes obviously will not give you any more detail with very few minor exceptions in certain cases.
    4x mode seems to have some color difference compared to 2x or native shot, like smaller color range (crushed blacks).

    Overall i highly doubt it will ever replace default Ansel method of tiled screenshots which even though has its own share of drawbacks, at the very least will give you appropriate data for each pixel rather than doing a faithful recreation of image in high resolution, replacing scaling filter artifacts with blotches representing same detail at higher resolution.

    Also for the curious how the AI stacks up with classic upscaling methods, here's output from Photoshop CC, using "Preserve detail" preset:
    2x Upscale (3840x2160 / 4.37 MB)
    4x Upscale (7680x4320 / 12 MB)
     
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  6. Cyberdyne

    Cyberdyne Guest

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    Nice comparison. Looking at the small piece of wood on the lower right, it heavily favors the AI 4x output over the PS upscale. While her face edges where kinda messed up by the AI output and kinda looks better in PS.
     
  7. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    I also processed a single monochromatic texture (2B skirt pattern from Nier Automata) which originated as 512x512 jpeg uploaded onto twitter by one of devs:
    [​IMG]
    And upscaled it all the way to 8K:
    https://i.redd.it/2jsv43bzqp421.png
    (Bear in mind this is not 100% default output as i did some photoshop processing to remove jpeg artifacting and increased contrast to remove some of AI output artifacts that probably were caused by jpeg noise)

    All in all it might have some viability in doing quick and dirty texture upscaling, especially if they're for stylized games which do not have any sort of detailed/photorealistic patterns.
     
  8. Cyberdyne

    Cyberdyne Guest

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    This might be a cool way to easily make full high res texture packs for emulators.

    Also, is there a way to try this without installing Experience? Maybe someone can upload the exe folder??

    EDIT: scratch that, you can just extract the geforce experience folder from the driver installer and it works fine
     
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2018
  9. Cyberdyne

    Cyberdyne Guest

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    So this is not 1080p, but it's 4x. I just think a 135p image is just not enough to work with lol.
    https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/201812121945511ResUp.png

    This is a 1080p RAGE screenshot
    Original https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/9200201701121223041.png
    X4 https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/9200201701121223041R.jpg
     
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  10. WareTernal

    WareTernal Master Guru

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    I made a close up comparison
    Some areas look great, but others(like bottom of chin) show little improvement.

    Thanks! I wanted to see what it would do with an extreme case. It actually did a pretty good job - like really good on some of the leaves.
    Here are all 3 versions scaled to 720 for comparison.
     

  11. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    For clarification 4x upscale of 1920x1080 image is actually 8k.
     
  12. Cyberdyne

    Cyberdyne Guest

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  13. SkyR34

    SkyR34 Active Member

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  14. XenthorX

    XenthorX Ancient Guru

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    all your comparison shots ar ereally impressive, i'll give it a shot!
     
  15. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    Highly doubt anyone here can answer that question, unless there is a sample set of before/after images for this tool so you could also take the "before" images and process them through NVIDIA AI then compare results.

    Obviously Topaz AI seems to be trained with actual photography in mind whilst NVIDIA one is oriented strictly for ingame screenshots which probably have a lot in common in terms of similarity of data set but in the end i imagine the very reason NVIDIA didn't give RTX users an option to use their AI on any image out of the box is to avoid possibly unfavorable comparisons with non-targeted image types.
     

  16. Cyberdyne

    Cyberdyne Guest

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    Which is interesting, because it's actually VERY good at dealing with art, I mean look at this.
    Original (1909 x 991) https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/Konachancom272505boo.png
    Bicubic (7636 x 3964) https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/db0Konachancom272505boo.jpg
    AI x4 (7636 x 3964) https://u.cubeupload.com/Cyberdyne/Konachancom272505boo.jpg
    It's not even a contest.
     
  17. skacikpl

    skacikpl Maha Guru

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    It doesn't surprise me, after seeing prior results i already came to conclusion it's good at scaling up while somewhat "preserving" detail but is ultimately unable to create or fake new details.
    Which makes it very mediocre for upscaling photorealistic images with lots of detail but really good for images where there's no detail, so heavily stylized stuff with games like Fortnite/Dishonored, Anime shows or cartoons or stylized artworks.

    With that said, given their capabilities, skills and resources NVIDIA could probably throw in fake detail generation into their AI, given the path already has been pioneered by solution like ESRGAN which actually attempts to add new details into upscaled image:
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
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  18. WareTernal

    WareTernal Master Guru

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    Doom Neural Upscale 2X
     
  19. VillainGuy

    VillainGuy Guest

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    If you just pass in a garbage argument for the color portion it will work on non-RTX cards like so:

    'C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA NvDLISR\nvdlisrwrapper.exe D:\testimage.png 4 blahblah'

    I also tried to use arguments outlined in the NGX documentation but didn't get anything (couldn't change output etc.) but feel free to check it out here https://docs.nvidia.com/rtx/ngx/programming-guide/index.html
     
  20. Felldude

    Felldude Member

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    Sorry if this was a dead post but I found this when I was trying to compile the old NGX Superimage Resolution Samples from Nvidia kept getting the black box error, and moved on to this.

    So I downloaded a random 8k image from the internet down-scaled it 2k in Gimp then used NvDLISR to upscale back to 8k....it recreated some of the details almost perfectly.
    Even comparing them in Nvidia ICAT the changes where minor or some blurring.

    I thought this is too good to be true, tried a different image...it looked terrible which made me wonder did the GPU keep the 8k image and just cheat (Learn) from the image it had loaded in memory from Gimp....

    I would say that is what happened based off my experience...Im going to try and hold as many images in VRAM as I can and then compare up-scaling results

    [​IMG]

    I got ISR working thanks to this thread, allows for 8x scaling
    Making a new forum thread here
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2023

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