Skip to content

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Starting

You can start the GUI running upscale-gui from the terminal or using the desktop entry.

Layout

The main window is split into three panels:

Panel Content
Left sidebar List of profiles (including a global entry) with a toolbar at the bottom for editing.
Central grid Live thumbnails of all open, valid windows. Click one to upscale it.
Right sidebar Tabbed settings panels that control how the upscaler behaves once working.

Central Grid: Window Previews

The central grid shows the windows that the upscaler can capture.

If a window doesn't appear

The grid updates periodically (every 2 seconds). If you can't see a window which should be valid, make sure it's not minimized.

Here you can:

  • Type in the bar at the top to filter by window title.
  • You can also navigate through it using Ctrl+F to focus the filter bar, then ↓ to move focus to the grid and any other arrow key to navigate through the thumbnails.
  • Finally, click or press Enter/Space on a selected tile to start upscaling that window.
  • And... That's it! Superresolution magic (hopefully)! ✨✨✨

Closing the upscale overlay

Once upscaling, you can use the Close hotkey Alt+Shift+Escape to stop upscaling and close the app.

For more info on hotkeys, see Controls.

Settings tabs

To customize the upscaling (or the app itself) you can change the settings at the right sidebar, organized into these tabs:

Tab Configuration options
General Model, Double upscale, Focus tracking, Daemon mode
Scaling Spatial upsampler / downsampler
Display Monitor, GPU, V-Sync, FPS limit, Wayland scale factor
Presentation Overlay, Geometry, Cursor Hiding, Crop, Offset, Background color
Effects Debanding, CAS sharpening, Bloom, Vignette, Film grain, LUT color grading
Advanced Vulkan, Tile processing, Timing, Error recovery
Extras Screenshot directory and template, On-Screen Display
GUI Style GUI color scheme and style

Relevant settings

Three of these settings deserve a look:

  • Model defines the SRCNN model to use, ordered from the fastest (but worst quality) veryfast to the slowest (but superior) 8x32. Each model upscales to 2x, differing in resource usage. Depending on your system and the window to upscale, you may want to test each to find the best tradeoff for you.

    Testing SRCNN models

    • You can cycle through all the models using the hotkey Alt+Shift+M.
    • The upscaler uses a tile-based processing, actively processing only the tiles (sections of the frame) that change. Static or mostly static frames therefore consume less GPU power than dynamic ones. Use a window with changing frames when evaluating models.
    • If you want to measure performance, consider using a tool like MangoHUD.

  • Double upscaling applies two consecutive 2x upscaling passes, with a total of 4x. This increases GPU usage and could lead to slower frames, so keep that in mind.

  • Daemon Mode, that enables automatic upscaling (see below).

Saving settings, or reverting them

Once you've changed any settings to your liking, you can save or revert them with the buttons at the bottom:

  • Save: Writes the current configuration to the YAML configuration file in ~/.config/linux-rt-upscaler/config.yaml.
  • Reset: Reverts all unsaved changes back to the last saved state. The button also has a dropdown menu with additional actions:
    • If a profile is active: "Clear profile overrides" removes all options from that profile, falling back to global settings.
    • If global settings are active: "Restore system defaults" resets every option to the factory defaults.

About the YAML configuration file

  • For operations like duplicating a profile, editing the file with a text editor may be easier.
  • The upscaler keeps backups of this file, but if the data is important to you, consider keeping your own backups.
  • Changes to the GUI style are saved to ~/.config/linux-rt-upscaler/config-gui.yaml, independently of the upscaler settings.
  • For more info, see Configuration.

Why use profiles

When upscaling a variety of windows, you may want to use different settings for each scenario. For example, while an 800x600 window would need double upscaling to reach a 4k output, a 1080p one doesn't need the extra upscaling.

For this reason, the upscaler supports configuration profiles that let you define specific settings for each window or setup. They contain settings overrides that change how the upscaler behaves for matching windows.

For more info on profiles, see Configuration.

Profile list and toolbar

The profile list shows Global (applies to all windows) followed by your custom profiles.

The toolbar at the button contains buttons that let you:

  • Add a new profile (Ctrl+N).
  • Edit an existing profile (Enter, F2 or double-click).
  • Delete a profile (Del).
  • Reorder with up/down arrows (Ctrl+Shift+↑/↓).

Creating a profile

  1. Click the + button in the profile toolbar (or press Ctrl+N).
  2. A dialog opens where you can:
    • Name the profile.
    • Optionally, set an icon from an open window or from a file.
    • Optionally, define any rules that the window needs to satisfy to automatically match.
  3. After creating it, the profile appears in the left list, where it can be selected and edited.

Selecting a profile

  • Selecting a profile (clicking it or navigating to it with arrow keys) activates it, and the right sidebar switches to editing that profile’s overrides.
  • Instead, if the Global entry is active (no custom profile selected), the settings sidebar edits the base configuration that every window uses unless a profile overrides it.

Applying a profile

Profiles are applied:

  • Manually by clicking a profile in the list. Any window upscaled that doesn't match a profile will use the manually selected profile.
  • Automatically when selecting a window thumbnail if all the match rules are satisfied.
  • With the Daemon mode (see below), if a match is found, the daemon switches to that window and applies the profile’s options.

Daemon Mode

When Daemon Mode is enabled (found in the General tab), a background process continuously looks for windows that match any of your profiles. As soon as a match appears, the daemon:

  1. Focus the matched window.
  2. Starts upscaling with the profile’s settings.
  3. If the window closes, the daemon goes back to scanning for the next match.

Daemon mode is ideal if you want to automatically upscale a profiled window as soon as it launches, or if your mouse died from exhaustion after a long day of multi-clicking~.