I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; ESRGAN is a new godsend AI technique that can significantly improve the textures of older titles. So far we’ve seen modders using ESRGAN to enhance and improve the textures of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom and Morrowind, and today I’m happy to report that a new HD Texture Pack has been released for the first Max Payne game.
ESRGAN, also known as Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adverserial Networks, is an upscaling method that takes an low-res image and adds realistic details to it. By doing it over several passes with the goal of fooling its adverserial part, it will usually produce an image with more fidelity and realism than past methods.
Since this Texture Pack uses the AI upscaling technique, all of the improved textures retain the aesthetics of their original textures. In my opinion, this is the best thing that ESRGAN brings to the table as modders won’t have to find and replace the textures of older games with new ones that can literally destroy their artistic style.
Created by modder ‘Gaiver74’, this HD Texture Pack for Max Payne enhances a few thousand (~95%) of game textures. Now while Gaiver74 used ESRGAN, he also combined the newly improved textures with some hand-made textures. The new textures have increased resolution from 2X to 8X and this pack also includes textures for decals, blood, clothing and for some parts of the UI.
Those interested can download the pack from here, and below you can find some comparison screenshots between the AI-enhanced and the vanilla textures.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW WITH ONE AMAZING TRICK YOU CAN TURN MAX PAYNE 1 INTO MAX PAYNE 2.
This is what this feels like to me. some dodgy ad, i cant believe how much the pc community has achieved over the years.
I remember the first time i saw max payne running in a computer store i thought to myself “wow it looks photorealistic”
And to this day i still think it looks quite good
It isn’t overly shiny like modern games and I like this.
I wonder if it’s even possible to approach to this level of grittiness with modern graphics.
Thank you for deleting my comment mods, don’t why you want to hide the truth.
The comparison shots are MISLEADING!.
The “Before” screenshots were taken on LOW settings, making you believe that the Mod does more than it actually does. The mod does improve visual, but not as much as the comparisons make you think.
Max Payne High settings: https://i.imgur.com/s05mk7h.jpg
With Mod: https://i.imgur.com/Q5QcL1o.jpg
Steam game just exiting during loading the level
huh makes sense
Could this ESRGAN voodoo theoretically be integrated in some basic form into emulators so polygon-based games from PS1, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, etc, could all instantly benefit?
I’m aware that some/most emulators already allow for the internal rendering resolution, texture filtering, anti-aliasing, etc, to be boosted far beyond what the original host consoles ever did but doing that alongside having what ESRGAN does would theoretically give even better results.
ESRGAN in its current guise seemingly needs to be painstakingly manually applied on a game by game basis but if it could evolve, even in only a basic form, into being a plug-in for PCSX2 et al then that’ll be pretty awesome for retro gaming. Even more awesome than a Soulja Boy ‘console’! ?
That is not technically feasible.
Yes, it is, Cemu did this with its graphics packs.
It couldn’t be “integrated” into emulators, at least not on the fly. (If you have a GPU that can handle this I think Nvidia or AMD will want to talk to you about your future technology.) You could however extract the textures from the game and apply ESRGAN and reimport.
As the OP said ESRGAN needs to be painstakingly manually applied, it could theoretically be put in an emulator to be applied before the game starts but this would take a long time, require the user to have a decent GPU and results would vary as ESRGAN often requires manual postprocessing and tweaking.
n64 games have texture packs
Ditto GameCube but in both instances it’s only a tiny fraction of games that have received such a thing from the modding community. The hypothetical solution I referred to would theoretically benefit every single polygon-based game on numerous emulated consoles if it were to happen.
I actually don’t see much difference. Is it true that ‘before’ photos are on low settings?
Yeah, Max Payne on high settings looks almost the same as these new textures. Better in some cases.
actually to my surprise, to this day, it DOES NOT need modes. That game is bonkers!
Looks great! but some areas looks like you just have anisotropic filtering set to x16 and DSR to 4k.
Oh and did you know that the Roscoe Street station clock is fully functional? such attention to detail in 2001. I still look after clocks in modern games. All are static. Pffffff
These ESRGAN guys seem to have a thing for useless mods apparently.
This is awesome…I was waitiin for this!
Will say this a million-th time…Max Payne is the greatest action game of all time!
They aren’t, the “before” screenshots were taken on Low settings.
This is a pretty meh mod once you realize that the comparison shots are misleading, as the settings in the “Before/Original” shots were taken on LOW settings.
This is Max Payne on High settings: https://i.imgur.com/s05mk7h.jpg
This is Max Payne using the mod: https://i.imgur.com/Q5QcL1o.jpg
Sure, it does look better, but it’s a rather small increase in detail, that is also not really noticable if you don’t focus on it.
We have not deleted anything, however we are banning your second account that we caught you using for commenting. Obviously it’s not allowed using multiple accounts
Looking at those new textures compared to the old ones is a breath of fresh air
Hmmm…..Makes sense !
Okay….But, when you post any link/url/video, the comments need to get an approval from the MOD here on Dsog, so I don’t think the comments were deleted.
You need to wait for the moderator to approve your comments, so that they are visible to everyone here to read. It takes time, and sometimes it becomes frustrating to wait for our comments to get approved by this site.
Though, john does this to reduce the spam on his website. Because spammers can post any link, which might get this site into trouble, imo.
Yes, they will disappear, but once the mod approves it, it’s going to visible online again. Wait..
No. It’s just awaiting approval from a mod as ForeBode88 said. I’ve been through this before. They will only get auto-deleted permanently if the comment/pic is “Marked as Spam”. That’s not what is happening here.
To avoid delays in the future upload your pics directly. Save pic to desktop. Click on the bottom right icon in the comment box and upload the pic.
You are absolutely correct. We get lots of spam and this cuts down on the bots.
Someone should do this for System Shock 2, Thief 1/2 and Undying. Maybe the PC Harry Potter 1-4 games, because why not
Re-Volt.
Now if they can just to F.E.A.R I am replaying this game after 13 years. Whatever happen to all the great games with physics like older games. Max Payne and F.E.A.R, Crysics. have great physics for it’s time. I would think by now there would be a lot of games using better physics.
the original version does’nt look that bad!
Tried this…looks really good. But the problem is I can’t make the ‘Widescreen fix’ work with this since this uses a modified exe.
Best game Remedy has ever made.
For the love of god, stop linking to album pages. DIRECT LINK.
Also, others have pointed out that the “original” shots are on low settings which is absurdly misleading. You should delete this whole article or replace the “original” shots with proper ones.
Seems like just a thick AA filter was applied
Looks great. Look at his fingers. Still blocky. So the next step, and it will happen, is that you can feed a 3d character model into the AI, and it will upres the model, understanding what fingers, a jaw, eyes, etc are –doing bone rigging, vertex painting, loop cuts, and uv mapping on its own. Then some day, we’ll be able to feed entire 3d levels into the AI, and it can generate a new level or an updated level. Then, some day, we’ll be able to feed entire games into the AI and say “Hey, AI, please make me a new Max Payne game in the style of the original.” The baby steps already exist for this thanks to machine learning, and none of it is extreme or sci-fi at this point.
Great Mod, Now I need this mod for Max Payne 2 😀