Cupscale Installation

Cupscale is a Windows GUI application that makes ESRGAN upscaling as easy and accessible as possible.

Installation

Note: If you get a warning from an antivirus, it might be caused because the program is not well known to their databases yet. Make sure you downloaded it from the source (GitHub). Additionally letting VirusTotal run over it is always a good idea for any download that can be executed.

• Download the latest release (Cupscale.exe) from the official source here. Save the program anywhere - all needed files are contained in the executable.
• Open the executable. Cupscale will download some resource files on the first run.
• Cupscale will now prompt you to set a model folder. Set it to the folder you store your ESRGAN models in (or an empty folder if you don't have an yet).
• Open the "Dependency Checker" window by clicking the icon with a chechbox in it at the top right corner.
• You now need to install Python and some packages. There are two options to do this:

  A: Follow the Windows ESRGAN install guide. The advantage is that it works with other tools too and only needs to be installed once, however it requires a bit more time.

  B: Use the embedded installation of Python and all dependencies of ESRGAN - Click on "Embedded Python Installer" on the left and hit the button to install it. The advantage to this method is that it is easy and fast to do.

• The Dependency Checker should now tell you that you can upscale with CUDA (if you have an Nvidia GPU). You are ready!