Computer algorithm depixelizes your 8-bit graphics

For those of you who grew up playing video games, surely you would have noticed how far graphics in video games have come over the years. Imagine playing your NES and SNES titles on a High Definition 3DTV, won’t the pixels look all the more pronounced? Well, just like how there seems to be an app for everything, there is also nothing a good computer algorithm cannot fix – and here we are with one which is capable of automatically fixing all those pixels on your behalf, letting Mario look super smooth. 

It is as though you ran a permanent Adobe Illustrator filter over the entire game, turning those jagged pixels into smooth vector graphics. Specially designed and optimized specifically for 8-bit graphics, this algorithm is capable of figuring out just which pixel should remain and be enhanced so that the final image is more beautiful than ever before.

Of course, some might say that what you see above is from a 16-bit console, but it still is 8-bit graphics. The SNES, after all, came with a 16-bit CPU and an 8-bit GPU.

Do you think this is “computationally complex” as how some other sites put it, or is it just a lazy man’s method of smoothing things over? Could we see some emulators or consoles include this algorithm so that classic games will end looking all jazzed up? What do you think – do you prefer the smooth version or not?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gaming