Final Fantasy VII HD graphics mod makes backgrounds less blurry with machine learning
FF7 Remako HD Graphics has had its beta release today. You can find a download link for it here. The mod, which works for PC versions of Final Fantasy VII, increases the resolution of the game’s pre-rendered backgrounds by a factor of four. And it’s all thanks to machine learning.
“Using state of the art AI neural networks, this up-scaling tries to emulate the detail the original renders would have had,” the mod’s website notes. “This helps the new visuals to come as close to a higher resolution re-rendering of the original as possible with current technology.”
You can see what this mod looks like in the below trailer.
Final Fantasy VII used pre-rendered backgrounds so that its world could have more detail than what would have been possible otherwise. This was a popular technique in the era, and you can see it in other games for the original PlayStation, including the Resident Evil trilogy. But those backgrounds still had to be a file size small enough to fit on a PlayStation disc, so they lost a lot of their original sharpness to compression.
This mod brings those images to a clarity that is closer to their original quality.