Deep-learning Used To Enhance Zelda: Twilight Princess For NVIDIA SHIELD (In China)

Deep-learning can be used for myriad things, and has the potential to improve products and solutions in all industries. Relevant to the Techgage audience, deep-learning has allowed NVIDIA to accelerate AI denoising in its OptiX engine, while on the gaming side, it’s begun to enable super-sampling quality at a lower performance cost, with DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling).

If none of that seems too interesting, then maybe you’d be more drawn towards the idea of using deep-learning to enhance gaming classics. Say… The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess? Believe it or not, it’s already happened, and by none other than NVIDIA. “Wait… how is NVIDIA involved with Zelda?” That’s a great question.

As it happens, NVIDIA teamed up with Nintendo just over a year ago, enabling certain first-party console titles to be released on the SHIELD – but only in China. I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around it, but you actually can play games like Super Mario Bros. Wii on the SHIELD over there, much to the sudden irritation of fans on these shores.

Nonetheless, the latest move in the Chinese SHIELD store is impressive: deep-learning was used to upscale Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the result is downright impressive. Here’s a before/after shot showcasing the differences that AI can make to a classic game:

After the texture upscaling is performed, much of the detail around the scene suddenly gains additional detail, especially the stones that make up the bridge. Not all textures get upscaled quite as successfully, or interestingly, but overall, the differences are stark, and I’d imagine many would opt to play the game this way over the original.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess gets a graphical update.
Nvidia claims that by using deep learning, they have improved the quality of over 4,400 textures in the game. pic.twitter.com/wvyMNttNhd

— Chinese Nintendo (@chinesenintendo) January 15, 2019

This isn’t the first time a game has been upscaled through deep-learning. Close to this time last year, a DOOM project took advantage of the technology to vastly improve the fidelity in the low-resolution PC classic. In this case, original sprites were upscaled to 8x the original size, and then downscaled to 2x the original resolution. The results are impressive. In this case, both NVIDIA’s upscaler and Topaz’s AI Gigapixel software was used.

What classic games would you like to see treated to AI upscaling?