Hardware Acceleration & Vulkan

PixelForge uses the NCNN Vulkan neural network inference framework to achieve fast offline upscaling on consumer GPUs.

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1. What is NCNN Vulkan?

Vulkan is a cross-platform, low-overhead 3D and compute graphics API. By leveraging Vulkan through NCNN, PixelForge can run neural super-resolution directly on:

• NVIDIA GPUs (GeForce GTX / RTX)
• AMD GPUs (Radeon RX)
• Intel GPUs (Intel Arc, Iris Xe, UHD Graphics)
• Apple Silicon (via MoltenVK)

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2. One-Click GPU Engine Installation

PixelForge includes built-in engine provisioning:

1. In the right-hand Local AI Engine card, if the GPU engine is not detected, click Install Real-ESRGAN GPU Engine.
2. PixelForge downloads the official, portable NCNN Vulkan release archive directly from the official upstream repository (~55 MB).
3. The archive is verified and unpacked into your app's local user directory ({userData}/engines/realesrgan).
4. Once installed, the status pill changes to Real-ESRGAN GPU Ready and neural models become active immediately.

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3. Fallback Mechanism

If you run PixelForge on a system without a Vulkan-compatible GPU or prefer not to download the neural binary, the app automatically runs in Fast Lanczos3 HD mode. You can process images without any setup.