We’ve seen ray tracing in plenty of big, new PC games, and we’re starting to see the technique get ported back to older titles, too. Nvidia has released a fully ray-traced version of Quake 2 for RTX owners, and a new ReShade mod has been wowing us all month by showing us what ray tracing would look like in all sorts of games. Now even Nintendo titles are seeing the benefits.
The ReShade mod has now been brought to the Wii U emulator Cemu, which means we can see the effects of ray tracing in some of Nintendo’s most notable modern games, including Mario Kart 8, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Splatoon. This is, of course, just an approximation through path tracing – proper ray tracing has to implemented from the ground up – but the results are still impressive.
The new illumination techniques add a bit of depth to every scene. Some of the most notable-looking changes are the fire illumination and magical lights in Zelda. There’s also a subtle effect of light bouncing off of paint in Splatoon, and Rainbow Road is looking extra glowy.
You can see it all in action below.
The ReShade mod has similarly brought this type of global illumination to the likes of Skyrim and the Witcher 3, and even Yakuza Kiwami 2.
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Real ray tracing is, of course, much more impressive, but the performance cost is tough to look past. For now, anyway.