Awesome

CuNNy - Convolutional upscaling Neural Network, yeah!

Nice, small, and fast realtime CNN-based upscaler. Trained on visual novel screenshots/CG.

Currently very new and immature 😭.

Supports exporting to an mpv memeshader!

And now a Magpie effect!

Usage

The order of quality is 8x32 > 4x32 > 4x24 > 4x16 > 4x12 > 3x12 > 2x12 > fast > faster > veryfast. Conversely the order of speed would be the reverse.

The CuNNy-fast shader is the recommended shader if you're on a slow machine.

Variants:

• (No-suffix): Trained to be neutral and do no denoising or sharpening.
• SOFT: Trained to anti-alias & produce a soft output. Is probably the most 'artifact-free' variant if you don't count blur.
• DS: Trained to denoise & sharpen.
• NVL: Trained to upscale visual novel games & high-quality illustrations.

Standard model/backend combinations have been pre-generated in this repository. More versions of the models for different backends can be generated using the webapp: https://funnyplanter.github.io/

mpv

mpv shaders are found inside the mpv/ directory. Metric-focused variants are found inside the results/ directory. To activate, add glsl-shader="path/to/shader.glsl" to your mpv.conf.

There are versions of the mpv shaders use 8-bit dp4a instructions. They can be many times faster than the standard upscaling shader depending on if your hardware supports accelerated dp4a instructions. Requires vo=gpu-next with gpu-api=vulkan. They can be found inside the dp4a/ subdirectories.

Magpie

Magpie effects are found inside the magpie/ directory. To install, drag the files into the effects subfolder inside the root of your Magpie installation. Once installed you will be able to add the effect in the Scaling modes tab.

As CuNNy only upscales by a factor of 2x, if you are scaling a ratio between 1 and 2 (i.e. 720 -> 1080 [1.5x]) you will need to downscale after upscaling.

The choice of downscaler has a large effect on the resulting image quality and sharpness. A high-quality downscale effect is provided in this repository located inside the same magpie/ directory. Apply the downscale effect after the upscale effect.

Training

Tested training with PyTorch nightly on Linux with Python 3.11. If any errors arise try using nightly.

Create folders by running sh scripts/mkfolders.sh. Prepare data by running sh scripts/split.sh <input-folder> <output-128-grids>, then py scripts/proc.py <128-grids> <out>.

To train py train.py <data> <N> <D> where N is the number of internal convolutions and D is the number of feature layers.

Convert the resulting model to an mpv shader by running py mpv.py <models/model.pickle>.

Convert the resulting model to a Magpie effect by running py magpie.py <models/model.pickle>.

Trains very fast on my machine.

Quality

See results/.

License

LGPL v3