Firstly, I just had an idea that got myself pretty curious and interested in it, so I just really want to share it on the most suitable place I could find, I hope someone finds it interesting too because I’d love to see it one day or to have been helpful, so feel free to use this. Now straight into it:
Wouldn’t it be viable to use AI specifically on textures that are being rendered close to the camera within a defined threshold to increase detail on the relevant texture only while it is being “zoomed in” to fix the significant texture stretching that happens on almost any texture during gameplay or cutscenes that breaks immersion?
Explaining it more deeply, it has always bothered me when I just shove my face against a wall on a game for whatever reason and I can see that the textures are just blurry and low res from up close and only look good from the distance. This has not been fixed since basically forever because just increasing texture resolution would cause severe VRAM and performance issues, but since so many things are possible now with AI such as real time ray tracing and DLSS, I think it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that some technology for this purpose should be invented. Something that would work somewhat similarly to DLSS, dynamic resolution or even nanite, but for texture detail enhancement in camera close up situations. I believe this could be extremely beneficial for overall texture fidelity and immersion, with little impact on performance and a possibly very clever solution. It hopefully should be possible to access the texture’s distance from the camera rendering it, the original texture, PBR data like normal maps, and anything else needed, to then predict how it would look on a much higher resolution than just stretching the texture, to bring a lot of extra detail back on some sort of AI texture filtering that would also respect PBR on the rendered texture. It could even be called something like “NVidia CUTER”, standing for “Close-Up Texture Enhancement Rescaling” since it also makes the textures look cuter, that’d be the best name ever already.
Has anything significantly similar been done? Was it successful? Is this a possibly viable idea? I wouldn’t sue anyone for copying this nor be entirely sad/angry about it because I just really want to see it happen, so feel free, and thanks for the attention, I hope bringing this idea here was an appropriate enough place (if I should have posted it elsewhere, I’ll accept suggestions). Have a nice day/night.