models: consider adding into README how to get them.

[slashbeast]

Hey,

Please consider adding to README a section how to get the pre-trained model files. Currently you'd need to extract them from the following links

• https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/releases/download/v0.2.5.0/realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan-20220424-ubuntu.zip
• https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/releases/download/v0.2.5.0/realesr-animevideov3.pth
• https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/releases/download/v0.2.5.0/realesr-general-x4v3.pth

It took me a moment to figure out how to get a hold of them and I suspect many others would face similar challenge.

[Dragon1573]

I'm currently using Windows 11 for running this "upscale" process. I have to additionally download the ubuntu.zip and migrate models/ folder to where windows.zip is extracted to.

Also, those *.pth files from xinntao/Real-ESRGAN is not usable for the realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan.exe , we have to provide *.bin and *.param files for the *.exe .

---

If all releases zipball (include Ubuntu, macOS and Windows) contains models/ folder, it would be more convenient. ❤️

[slashbeast]

Currently not all the models are in latest ubuntu.zip either, You need to grab two of them

• https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/releases/download/v0.2.5.0/realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan-20220424-ubuntu.zip
• https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/releases/download/v0.2.3.0/realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan-20211212-ubuntu.zip

And extract the following files:

• realesr-animevideov3-x2.bin
• realesr-animevideov3-x2.param
• realesr-animevideov3-x3.bin
• realesr-animevideov3-x3.param
• realesr-animevideov3-x4.bin
• realesr-animevideov3-x4.param
• realesrgan-x4plus-anime.bin
• realesrgan-x4plus-anime.param
• realesrgan-x4plus.bin
• realesrgan-x4plus.param
• realesrnet-x4plus.bin
• realesrnet-x4plus.param

[ferrosa]

I've also been trying to run models from different collections. For example from https://openmodeldb.info, but they tend to come in .pth format.

I've downloaded pth2ncnn from this thread and also extracted it from the latest Cupscale release, but both versions of this tool fail with:

Error: Attempted to load a new-format model.

I don't know the difference between "new-format" and "old-arch".
There's plenty of unhelpful threads about converting the "new" or "old" formats of .pth to .param/.bin, all of them open and unresolved as of the time of writing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

However, using chaiNNer and following Upscayl's model conversion guide, it successfully converts those "new format" .pth files into ncnn's format.