Above is some pretty damn gorgeous footage of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running at 8K with a ray traced global illumination (RTGI) shader and some other bits and bobs. It's the Wii U version running through the CEMU emulator, and the video is the work of the Digital Dreams YouTube channel.
In addition to the RTGI shader used, the video also has the REVO Reshade Redux mod applied, which does away with some of less lifelike aspects of the game's art style while also eliminating "harsh contrast and saturation." The RTGI shader is the one created by Pascal Gilcher, whose Patreon you can check out.
Of the console companies, Nintendo is probably the most determined to keep its first-party games exclusive. Short of buying the game, dumping it and emulating it, you'll probably never see Breath of the Wild look like this on a Nintendo system, unless the next Switch iteration pulls some miraculous tricks.
- I just played Half-Life 2 RTX, a fully ray-traced overhaul of the original, and its meaty headcrabs have me hankering for more
- Nvidia's expanded Zorah demo tells us how AI is the future of graphics: 'There's no rasterization going on at all. This is all ray traced and the amazing part is that it's actually faster than rasterizing'
