Ethical AI upscaling for games. (formerly "mender")

What does it do?

It upscales an image by a factor of $4$ (1K → 4K, etc.) with a minimal hit to performance. For the renderer implemented in the official example, it produces a $2024\times2024$ image ~12 times faster than targeting $2024\times2024$ directly.

Ethical?

The dataset that was used to train the upscaling neural network was generated with Blender's Geometry Nodes. No artist's work was used in the process.

Roadmap

• Generate procedural data-set with Blender Geometry Nodes.
• Create a slim network architecture.
• Train the network.
• Create ray marching renderer (for SDFs).
• Implement inference on the WebGPU.
• Use multisampling for render passes.
• Create rasterizing renderer (polygonal geometry).
• Extract into a separate package, to be used as an upscaling step in other WebGPU projects.

Development

Local setup

• Install Node.js 22.12+
• Install pnpm
• Run pnpm install to install all dependencies
• Run pnpm dev to run the development server, making the web app available via the web browser.

Linting and formatting

• Run pnpm check to lint with oxlint and check formatting with oxfmt.
• Run pnpm fix to apply lint fixes and format files.
• Use pnpm lint or pnpm format:check to run either check independently.
• Install the recommended Oxc VS Code extension for linting and formatting on save. Astro files continue to use the Astro extension for formatting.

GPU development

The workspace uses TypeGPU 0.12.4 and unplugin-typegpu 0.12.3. Shaders are TypeScript functions marked with 'use gpu', including the convolution passes, bicubic filter, scene shaders, and optional edge-detection and cone-tracing passes. The demo uses published @typegpu/sdf and @typegpu/color packages. The pretrained inference model, convolution shaders, and color utilities live in packages/phoure-js; the demo consumes its MenderStep API from phoure. See the package README for inputs and lifecycle.

The typescript dependency is an npm alias for tsover 5.9.13, including a pnpm override for build plugins. This supports vector and matrix operators while remaining compatible with the existing Astro/Starlight stack. Select Use Workspace Version for TypeScript in VS Code; the existing SDK path still applies.

• pnpm check includes the recommended TypeGPU shader rules through oxlint.
• pnpm test:types checks every workspace with tsover.
• pnpm test:unit runs math and shader-generation tests, including all three neural-network layer configurations.
• pnpm test builds the workspace and runs both checks.

The optional cone tracer now accepts { root, cBuffer }, with buffers allocated by makeCBuffer(root, resolution). Edge detection accepts root in place of the old runtime. Both were unfinished modules using APIs removed from TypeGPU.