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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