You can see where this is going; over the past day I've been dicking around with these using the Deus Ex textures, and the results are pretty promising. The most common system used in 'the scene' is ESRGAN (since it's free), but I didn't think the results were very good for textures. Instead I've been using a commercial application, Topaz A.I. Gigapixel, and the results are pretty good.
Some comparison screenshots with Vanilla / New Vision 1.5 / New Vision 2.0 (i.e. AI Upscale):
https://imgsli.com/MjY4Mw
https://imgsli.com/MjY4NQ
https://imgsli.com/MjY4Ng
https://imgsli.com/MjY4Nw
https://imgsli.com/MjY4OA
https://imgsli.com/MjY4OQ
https://imgsli.com/MjY5MQ
https://imgsli.com/MjY5Mg
https://imgsli.com/MjY5Mw
https://imgsli.com/MjY5NA
What's so great about this?
- -It's ALMOST completely automatic, for most textures. Textures can be up-res'ed in batches and quickly previewed in game using the DX10 sideloading feature
- -It maintains the original art style and direction of Deus Ex, as there's no other artist's hand involved
- -It can be used on literally all game textures, including character models, which HDTP never had the manpower to touch
- -This is the big one: this can be made to work with any mod, using the same batch export / conversion process.
Well, it doesn't look as high fidelity as New Vision, obviously. There's limits to what the AI can do, especially as it's built on pattern recognition in photos. There are several factors that limit how successful the upscale is on textures, like the original resolution, how 'abstract' it is, etc.
I also haven't figured out a good technique for masked textures yet.
Enough talk - I want to try it out!
DOWNLOAD HERE
Alright, so to test this out you'll want to uninstall any other graphical mods. That includes New Vision 1.5 and HDTP.
Take the contents of the archive and put them in your DeusEx\Textures folder.
Launch the game with Kentie's Direct X 10 Renderer - this is important, as I'm currently using his sideloading technique to load the textures.
This leads to some jumpiness in game; this would disappear if I used the original method of DXT Merging; so it's a solvable problem.
Also thanks to Björn for helping me extract all the original textures using Hanfling's UCC script.