Even Old Mortal Kombat Cutscenes Are Better With AI

The ESRGAN machine learning network has already given a ton of classic games a cracking uplift, but the AI is capable of upscaling more than just old PC games.

The Gaming Restoration YouTube channel has uploaded a video of the Mortal Kombat Deception intro cinematic from the PS2. From there, they used a denoising model and special training model to upscale the intro from 640x448 to 2560x1920. The aspect ratio is still 4:3, so you're still going to deal with black bars, but the intro sequence is miles more viewable in 2019.

Here's the original intro:

And here's Raiden's fight with Quan Chi and Shang Tsung is in AI-upscaled 4K:

The upscaling isn't perfect. There's a lot of noise and halos on parts of the image, but compared to the original there's a hell of a lot more detail, clarity, and it's nicer to look at overall. Plus, part of how machine learning works is that it gets better over time the more data is fed into it.

The original Deception won't be the only FMV to get remastered, with The Gaming Restoration saying that they'll be upscaling the Mortal Kombat Armageddon intro as well. I can think of a few games that could use some AI upscaling. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 had plenty of FMV cutscenes for all of the campaigns, like this one. The channel has used ESRGAN on a few other classic games as well, including Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Dirge of Cerberus.


    The aspect ratio is still 4:3, so you're still going to deal with black bars,Erm, no it's not.

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