Starlight Mini distortion/tiling/warping issue on 1080p to 2160p upscales

[PC100]

Ever since Starlight Mini was released I have consistently had an issue with doing 2x upscales of 1080p content where the output gets warped slightly.

It looks like a tiling artifact, by which I mean I suspect that under the hood the video is being broken up into smaller tiles and pieced back together at the end, but that the reassembly isn’t quite aligned properly.

This comparison shows what I’m talking about: https://slow.pics/c/IBD01pTB

Image 1 is from the original and Image 2 is from Starlight Mini. You can toggle between images 1 and 2 by pressing 1 and 2 on your keyboard.

Images 3 and 4 are from Starlight Precise 2 and Starlight Fast 2 cloud models. Neither of those models experience the tiling issue, but both of those models are far inferior to the results from Starlight Mini.

My results from Starlight Mini were produced using an RTX5090 with no memory limit. Latest result from was from the V1.2.0 beta, but I’ve seen this same issue in all versions of Topaz Video including Topaz Video AI so far.

[Gemini]

Detailed Findings

1. Vertical Artifacts: There are subtle vertical seams running through the dark background and the stage floor. These often occur when the GPU memory processes the image in 512px or 1024px segments.

2. Horizontal Artifacts: Near the center of the character (around the chest and trench coat area), a slight shift in texture clarity can be seen, indicating a horizontal tile boundary.

3. Tiling Pattern: The “tile” method used in upscaling has created a subtle “ghost grid” that sits on top of the actual stage grid, visible primarily in high-contrast areas where the AI struggled to blend the edges perfectly.

[kyle.topazlabs]

Can you send the logs and if possible the original source file so we can have the team run some tests to see if we can replicate the issue?

help@topazlabs.com