BioWare used AI upscaling to remaster Mass Effect’s original textures

BioWare is the latest studio to turn to AI to breathe new life into a game based on old technology. The studio revealed to the media that it used AI to scale up all textures in the upcoming Mass Effect: Legendary Edition bundle. This is only a small part of the remastering process, but it helped the development team create a strong foundation to work from.

“We knew we wanted to increase the resolution of all textures in the trilogy,” said Kevin Meek, director of environment and characters during a roundtable with the press. So that means all the visual effects, the user interface, the environmental art, the character art – every texture we immediately encountered with two major changes. First, we’ve increased the cap that puts the motor on the texture gauges. And second, we ran all of the original uncompressed source images through an AI up-res program along with some other custom batch tools. “

BioWare did this for every texture in all three games. This was a huge undertaking – although more automated than some of the later update stages.

“So throughout the trilogy we’re talking tens of thousands of textures with resolution at least four times that of sixteen times,” said Meek.

This technique is not new, but it is finally catching on with the major publishers. Before that, Nvidia scaled up The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Nvidia Shield. And fans used AI tools to scale up resources in PlayStation classics like Final Fantasy VII. And now one of the biggest publishers is using the same concept to remaster one of its biggest franchises.