Need help with upscaling

[joshdomes]

i have seen and downloaded some packs from panda and a few others i cant remember the names sorry! I started upscaling my pcsx2 textures but i feel like they are wayyyyyy to big and i feel like i could be getting better upscaling from. i use chaiNNer for upscaling idk if that helps to know? this is the first time doing it so a real dumb down version would be awesome lol

 

[SomberShroud]

The holy grail of upscaling guides, taken from the "Tutorial?" thread, made by me. Upscaling most of the time is simple. This guide just discusses things to know for the first time and worst case scenario. If you get best case, its as simple as dumping and auto upscaling with 4xHDCube and then uploading the download link to share with others AKA one day upscales. I don't update this here, go to the site in my "signature" below and see the tutorial for the most up to date info.

I guess I can post my findings for right now until I complete my list of games I want to upscale, and then I'll make a comprehensive tutorial later down the line, for the time being here are some tips for dumping in general.

I start every dump first by enabling texture dumping(do these per-game settings instead of emulator settings so it doesn't apply to every game)

Spoiler: How to enable Texture Dumping

Right-click the game -> Properties -> Graphics -> Texture Replacements -> Dump Textures

then play the game for about 5 minutes then save state and close the emulator (don't count cutscenes towards playtime), check the newly created dumps folder in "PCSX2/textures/SLUS-XXXXX" where X will be filled in with numbers starting with 2.

Spoiler: How to find Game ID

right-click the game -> Properties -> Summary -> Serial: SLUS-XXXXX

If this folder already has 200+ textures in it, that's a red flag, check the texture dumps to see what the most common names are and how small the textures are, if the textures are tiny (64x64 or smaller) then the high texture count is expected, pay attention to file size though, most dumps are between 20-400 megabytes and 500-3000 files. A bad dump will have high file number and size, way above the estimates previously stated.
The good textures (most of the time) have 2 or 3 hyphens and look like this ex: 518bbd6c0ddb7991-3cc9f25b1d8fa414-r21000000210000-00005553.png
A bad texture (also known as a "bad dump") will have only one hyphen like this ex: 109f993e98e1f1aa-00002640.png
if "some" textures have one hyphen, that's a bad dump, more on that later.
If "all" textures have 2-3 hyphens, keep playing for an hour and check back to make sure there are no single hyphens. if there aren't any single hyphens then it's probably safe to assume it will be a safe dump, play to 100%
if "all" textures are one hyphen, it probably means that's the naming scheme specific to that game, I haven't encountered this more than once though so be cautious when this happens.

The most redundant textures that should exist in a proper dump should be between 2-25, if it exceeds this than its probably a one hyphen file that will dump infinitely (AKA a bad dump)
sometimes it can be a 2-3 hyphen in which case treat it like a bad dump, sometimes its a gif that just exported every individual frame, I haven't tested if the upscales for these work, proceed with caution. If you keep "Dump Textures" on and finish the game with a bad dump you will get 100,000+ textures which will be unsalvagable. To avoid this, disable "Dump Textures" and bind the hotkey "Toggle Texture Dumping" to Space (and remove any other hotkey that was space by default[probably fast-forward]) and just dump whenever a new texture/cutscene plays.

I recommend searching for cheats for each game since the PS2 was one of the last gen of console games libraries to feature them prominently. Cheats are a valuable asset in collecting every texture.

Once you've dumped the game, open the dumps folder and delete any bad dumps that might've appeared, usually there is a pattern to bad dumps like one image appears repeatedly but has the same suffix "-00006800". You can type in the search bar ~*6800.png and it will highlight every image with that suffix and you can check if they're similarly bad dumps and delete them (sometimes you'll need to go deeper than the last hyphen like ~*d90-00006800.png for a specific pattern of bad textures as good textures will be grouped in with the bad ones as well for the last hyphen). Once you've checked every texture is good, run the textures through your favorite AI upscaler, You could use Stable Diffusion if you have a beastly PC and don't mind the massive time sink, some good free models are bundled with Waifu-2x-Extension-GUI which I used before I discovered the best one IMO which is 4xHDCube4(There is a free version of this called 3xHDCube which is marginally worse) it costs $3 but saves significant amounts of time manually checking each texture to see which upscaler is best as it is as simple as insert textures -> convert -> Done. No need to check for errors which ESRGAN has a 5-10% error rate and when we're talking about thousands of textures, thats a painful amount of effort and isn't as good at converting and forgetting, just save yourself the hassle and get 4xHDCube, it's designed for 4x Upscaling unlike ESRGAN which is best at 2x without blurriness (sometimes) or 4x with a higher probability of blurriness.

If you do decide to go with 4xHDCube, I recommend these settings for ChaiNNer: 4xHDCube4.pth(Model A) 0% 4xHDCube4Plus-B.pth(Model B) 100% for high-detail textures such as real-life metal rust or walls. Change this to 50-50 or a higher mix of Model A if a game has mostly soft/2D drawing-style textures. Under Save image format, make sure it's DDS BC7 (Linear) with Best Quality compression as this is the highest quality compression which gives a massive performance boost at a barely noticeable reduction in fidelity. if you want compatibility with Mobile EMUs use DXT5 (legacy) instead until they add support for BC7.

If you decide to use Waifu-2x-Extension-GUI only, then you'll need another program to convert the PNGs to DDS. Use Custom Texture Tool PS v51.0 configured with compressonator and BC7 image format for best results, no need to install upscalers in Custom Texture Tool's installer.

Alas, even 4xHDCube isn't immune to errors but it's significantly better than ESRGANs rate at only <1% and (as of the time of this posting) only happens on very few games that have odd alpha channels, if you're a perfectionist like me then you'll want to clean up those bad textures so you'll still want Waifu-2x-Extension-GUI for this. ESRGAN(3D Real life model) is best for real-life textures while CUGAN is best for 2D drawings or UI, on rare occasions some of the other models might be better but those are the main 2 in most cases.
if a lot of textures are suddenly broken, like transparency issues then it's because the upscaler moved a non-alpha channel pixel into a spot with an alpha channel in it, breaking the texture. You can try re-rendering the textures as PNG instead of DDS to see if this fixes it. if that fails then try upscaling those specific textures with a different model. If that fails then you'll either have to manually remaster the texture in a photo editor like Photoshop or gimp, or just delete the texture and don't upscale it. If you ever open an image in an image editor it will show it at 50% opacity, this is expected, set opacity to 100% while editing. if you ever export a texture from an image editor or just straight up use an image from the internet to replace a texture, make sure you open the image in an image editor and export it with the Opacity at 50% otherwise transparency will break.

If you're having a hard time finding a specific texture from a level you can try sorting by Dimensions (it's not listed by default you have to right-click while inside the folder then "sort by" then "more..." and check Dimensions) or date. Dimensions will show the biggest textures (in relation to screen space, not storage space) first, while date will show the images dumped in chronological order, the latter is useful for things like looking through a bunch of 2D art all at once such as concept art, to make it easy to just multi-select them in the folder later.

if you plan on using different models for a certain pattern of similar-looking textures I'd recommend making 2 copies of the images by ctrl-clicking the images in the folder (this takes a while) and putting them in a separate folder, one as a base "Unmodified" folder and another for the modified textures.

You can organize the replacements folder with folders like: Environment, Fonts, Characters, Concept art, etc. It will still read the replacements folder correctly, just keep the image filenames the same(dumps folder won't work so keep those folders separate)

 

[joshdomes]

The holy grail of upscaling guides, taken from the "Tutorial?" thread, made by me. Upscaling most of the time is simple. This guide just discusses things to know for the first time and worst case scenario. If you get best case, its as simple as dumping and auto upscaling with 4xHDCube and then uploading the download link to share with others AKA one day upscales.

thank you so much i was able to start doing Champions - Return to Arms because of your help. i kept getting inf textures but because of your help i was able to figure out the good and bad textures