First of all, as many others have said, the idea that a new local model would be locked behind a Pro subscription (when getting the new updates / models is already a fairly high annual price) is insane. Is the price to upgrade new versions of the base “non-Pro” version going down? Is there going to be a new tier that would still allow to keep using the version you have paid for while also getting access to all models? Feels like a massive slap in the face at best. And in the area of significant advancement in open-source and other local models, a pretty slippery slope…
But anyway, I did a quick test by taking a 360p version of one of those OLED test videos and trying to upscale it to 1080p with both SL Mini and this new “SL Sharp”.
First, there is a problem with SL Sharp and even remotely big areas of darkness. Seems to create a gray checkerboard pattern:
SL Sharp does retain specularity / surface sheen much better compared to SL Mini.
Here’s SL Sharp:
And SL Mini:
SL Sharp seems to swing for the fences a bit more in trying to create plausible material texture and light response, compared to SL Mini. For real-world objects, it seems pretty good, although the colors / sharpening can make things a bit more garish-looking as well.
Here’s the original 360p frame:
SL Mini - smoother, with plausible surface detail, but kind of dull looking and fairly blurry:
SL Sharp - even finer (while still being plausible) surface detail, but the green and reds go a bit overboard:
And here’s the actual 1080p encode:
And here’s one more challenging example with a lot of movement and fine particles / bubbles, with the original being a pretty big mess.
Here’s the original 360p:
SL Mini - smoothed over and duller, but did maintain pretty good consistency in motion:
SL Sharp - shockingly clear and usable a lot of the time, but it would break / “reset” occasionally (which was distracting) Also had a slight color shift:
And the actual 1080p for reference:
There are definitely things the new model can do quite well. But the results others have shown with people that are a certain size in the frame do look rough, and I’m not really sure how you can get past that if you are shooting for results this much sharper from one model pass.
Installing the beta went fine for me - SL Mini and SL Sharp both did the system check and downloaded no problem when I first clicked on them, and I was able to use the menu to start SL Sharp without issue.
I have a 9950X3D and an RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell. FPS bounced all over the place with SL Sharp (fluctuating mostly between 0.8fps and 1.1fps with occasional spikes to 1.3 and down to 0.5 upscaling from 360p to 1080p), but overall was still significantly faster than SL Mini (which settled into a consistent 0.5fps). If we could get those kinds of speedups for SL Mini, that would be a pretty massive win!
Notably, VRAM usage for SL Sharp was also all over the place according to Windows task manager (going up to 23GB, then down to 13, then eventually up to 28, down to 18, then repeat the cycle up to 28 and down to 18, etc.). SL Mini used less max VRAM (going up to about 25GB and staying there consistently) but SL Mini also had spiky CPU usage much more often (presumably from encoding frames to add to the temp video much more often). Probably goes without saying, but neither model remotely tried to use the full 96GB of VRAM I have.
Unrelated to all of the above - preferences menu is completely borked with Windows scaling, I can’t read or change the vast majority of settings.
