In the NEXT beta update, a brand new image upscaling pipeline will be added for testing.
This new pipeline focuses on drastically improving batch image upscaling (processing multiple images at once) speeds by over 300% through better optimization and more efficient parallelism.
For this initial implementation, the new pipeline currently only supports the Waifu2x-NCNN-Vulkan engine to get it ready for beta release faster. However, it will definitely be expanded to other engines in future updates and will eventually replace the legacy pipeline entirely.