A texture pack replaces the game's textures with larger versions. PC Options can build one for you from the textures your own copy dumps, upscaled on your GPU with Real-ESRGAN (Windows only).
- Dump. PC Options → Graphics: set Texture pack to Off, turn on Dump textures (an advanced
row: System → Show advanced options), restart and play the parts you want. Every texture the game
draws lands once in
textures\4D53082D\dumpnext togow2.exe. A dump goes into the active pack root, so with a pack chosen it ends up inside that pack and the builder does not see it. - Build. PC Options → Graphics → Build texture pack (works in the launcher, before the game
loads). Choose the scale (2x or 4x) and the quality, then Start. The status row counts the
textures (
Building 120 / 724). You can press Play and keep it running in the background; quitting the game cancels it. Cancel and Start again picks up where it stopped, and a later build only adds the textures you dumped since. The builder runs Real-ESRGAN on the same GPU as the game. - Pick. When it says
Done, choose the new pack (dump-2x,dump-4x,dump-2x-bc7ordump-4x-bc7) in Texture pack and restart.
Only colored BC1/BC2/BC3 textures of 128 pixels or more on a side are upscaled. Normal maps (recognised by their blue-violet average color), grayscale textures (paint-damage masks, specular maps, light cones and gradients, emissive masks), noise (the rgba8 dither/jitter textures), single-channel masks and textures smaller than 128 pixels keep the disc version: Real-ESRGAN would invent detail in them and a plain resize only costs memory. In the chapter 2 hospital, 161 of the 431 color-format textures that were upscaled were grayscale: a paint-damage mask came back with harder, darker blobs and drew black splotches on a door, two rgba8 noise textures were smoothed flat, and 64-pixel textures came out darker and invented. No side goes above 4096.
2x has about 4 times the pixels, 4x about 16 times; BC7 is sharper than the disc's own formats and takes about twice the memory. Measured on 40 textures:
| Pack | Size |
|---|---|
| Disc textures | 5.5 MB |
| 2x, BC7 | 54 MB |
| 4x, BC7 | 214 MB |
If the game stutters or runs out of video memory with a 4x pack, use 2x or raise PC Options → Graphics → Texture cache.
Each pack is a folder in texture_packs next to gow2.exe holding 4D53082D\replace\*.dds, with the
same file names as the dumps (the game matches the 16-digit hash at the start of the name). Open
texture packs folder opens it. The builder works in texture_packs\.build and deletes it when it
finishes. It needs tools\texconv and tools\realesrgan next to gow2.exe, which the release zip
includes; a source build gets them from scripts\package.ps1. A pack you make yourself by hand goes in
the same place (README, "Texture packs").
A pack built from the game's textures is derived from the game's copyrighted art. It is for your own copy: do not share it. This project does not host or link packs made from the game's art.
- Real-ESRGAN by Xintao Wang et al. (realesr-animevideov3-x4 model, BSD 3-Clause) and Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan (MIT), on ncnn (BSD 3-Clause).
- DirectXTex texconv (MIT) for the DDS and PNG conversion and the mip maps.
License texts: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.