Thread: weird ai upscaling in 7.3 cutscenes?

hi! without spoiling the otherwise great msq of 7.3 (in my opinion), i and some friends noticed some strange distortion and wonky edges/linework in some particular snippets of the cutscenes found in the new patch, particularly of some still shots from earlier patches. i do not use a graphics card that utilizes ai upscaling myself, so if i am correct, these objectively very wonky upscales were placed into the game from the devs themselves.

i understand ai is often used to assist with visuals (think the upscaling of some older games or movies, which often will have humans fix the errors/distortion on to speed up development), but... why use it in the first place? ffxiv should not need to be upscaled, being a newer game. surely the dev team has access to a higher-end pc capable of outputting high-quality in-engine/game screenshots no problem. to me, even though these snippets of the cutscenes last only for a few moments, it comes off as lazy and haphazard. and perhaps a little bit tone-deaf towards dawntrail's sort of outlook on ai...??? not sure if this is a "cold take" or not though

i would love to hear your thoughts on this, too, and if this is something the dev team should correct or at least try to touch up by hand instead of likely popping it out in a good five seconds, haha :,) i hope i'm making some sense here, too!

I seriously hope it isn't the case, cause that's really bad

You need to post an example of what you're referring to for this topic to go anywhere.

Thanks. The other two look fine to me but I see what you mean with the eyes comparison, although I don't know what the point of using AI would be for something they could easily just take a screenshot of for a fraction of the effort. Tough to say what the real story is though. Maybe it's repurposed concept art?

Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Thanks. The other two look fine to me but I see what you mean with the eyes comparison, although I don't know what the point of using AI would be for something they could easily just take a screenshot of for a fraction of the effort. Tough to say what the real story is though. Maybe it's repurposed concept art?

100%. i have no issue with ai upscaling when it is done, for lack of a better way to put it, right. a personal example of this would be an upscale i saw out and about for FF9-- the background work, which (iirc) square enix had lost high resolution versions of when remastering the game, were restored via upscaling + hand-correction by fans of the game. that's awesome! however, i'm just not so sure why it was needed for recent content-- not even something like, back from ARR-- when it definitely isn't some lost high-resolution content by any means.

in regards to the screenshots, the sphene one can definitely just be some perspective + camera focus playing tricks on me, as it was mainly the hair on her cheeks i was looking at with that one. as for krile's mom, the inconsistency with outlines bordering her ears is what makes me iffy, as well as seemingly the shading on her eyelids. i could attribute this perhaps to the filter that goes over the flashbacks, but past instances of flashbacks in cutscenes don't seem to have this weird issue her and calyx seem to have?? it's just bizarre. i can't really see it being concept art either personally. the strands of hair on the back of calyx's head definitely seem like in-game textures as opposed to a rendering

I don't think it's AI artifacting. I think that's classic JPG artifacting. They compressed it.