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

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

“We knew we wanted to increase the resolution on all the textures across the trilogy,” environment and character director Kevin Meek said during a roundtable with press. “So that means all of the visual effects, the user interface, the environment art, the character art — every single texture we hit right away with two main changes. First, we increased cap that the engine places on the texture sizes. And secondly, we ran all the original, uncompressed source art through an AI up-res program along with some other custom batch tools.”